More Goodies and Overclocking
Memory Support
The KT333 chipset supports upto 3GB of DDR333 memory (or
if you are not overclocking standard PC2100 DDR will do just fine).
Overclocking the
KT3 mainboard:
Even though the MSI KT3 Ultra2-BR is more of a value
oriented motherboard, it still quite a wild side. Using a stick of Crucial PC2700 DDR
RAM we were able to get the FSB up to 180 MHz before the memory started to give
us problems. Lowering the timings to the most conservative in the BIOS allowed
us to push the FSB to 187 MHz! Not bad for any motherboard!
Because we had to use conservative
memory timings of 187 MHz, it
resulted in lower performance then when we tested at 180 MHz with aggressive
memory timings.
Please remember the issues between the KT266A and
KT333CE when viewing the benchmarks though.
IDE RAID at UDMA 133/100...
Officially the Promise "Lite" Controller
only supports RAID mode 0 (striping), however it's possible to flash the
controller with a regular firmware thus unleashing RAID modes 1 and
0+1.
IDE RAID 0 is not really considered a true RAID since there
isn't any data redundancy. RAID 0 takes two drives of the same size/configuration and
stripes them, meaning it makes one big drive out of two equal ones. This
improves performance by cutting hard drive latency in half.
Since the data is divided equally and written on two hard drives it also
increases the data bandwidth by two. The reason it's not considered true RAID is
because if one drive fails, all data is lost.
IDE RAID 1 on the other hand mirrors two
drives of the same size, so in theory if one drive fails, the other will take
over as the primary hard drive and the system can continue to operate normally.
This is what is supposed to happen with a SCSI hard drive setup and it actually
works pretty well there.
The IDE subsystem doesn't allow hard
drives to be disconnected while the computer is still powered up and in use like
SCSI can unless you have a special HDD tray. Generally, when one IDE drive fails
the system usually locks up anyway. The data is safe since it's mirrored on the
other drive which is the real benefit.
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