What if your ram is maxxed out and can't be overclocked? ddr2-800 ram at 4-4-4-12 can't really be overclocked much. Same with 1066 at 5-5-5-15.
You just bump it back to 667 or 800 before you start raising your Bus. As you up your Bus the memory starts getting back to its default speed. Same with the Hypertransport.
My CPU benchmarks were higher using the multiplier than with the bus speed overclocking. I've tried both ways. AMD setups like higher multipliers rather than bus speeds.
Not true, it doesnt care which way you do it. If your using the Bus you can overclock your memory and HT which will increase the overall performance ( but saying that, raising the HT doesnt increase the performance by much on a AMD because it isnt flooding the bandwidth anyway) but both together will bump your score up some.
The difference today then just like 4 or 5 years ago is the yield rates are so much higher on a wafer. Back then on a wafer you would have cores that would run stable from like (example) 2.0ghz to 3.0ghz. So they were sold at the ghz. they were stable at. The upper ones got unlocked and sold at a higher price.
Now with the yield rates so high on the Core 2/Phenom II, other then a few dud cores about all of them will clock high, to get lower models they have to underclock them. Thats why it seems no matter which one they review it seem to overclock pretty close the same. Like most all of the Athlon II/Phenom II can hit pretty close to between 3.7/4.0 ghz unlocked or not.
It comes down to this, To me the 550 just falls in a bad spot. Building one for myself or a customer you can get the 245 for 35 bucks less or the 720BE for 16 bucks more. I think the 250s are not bad processors but priced to close to the 545.
I have nothing against any of them. AMD just has to many processors priced to close together that will all overclock about the same. Now pretty soon they are going to throw a Athlon II X4 in the mix. Before long there will be a Athlon II X2/X3/X4 and a Phenom II X2/X3/X4, might even throw a Sempron in there somewhere
. My God how do you price processors like that when the benchmarks will be all over the place