David Maynard wrote:
BigBadger wrote:

No it's not 333MHz, it's actually a 166 'MHz' FSB processor....333 is
just
AMD hype to sell the virtues of the DDR bus. Intel do the same trick but
they multiply the real bus speed by 4x.


Double and quad pumping the bus is not "hype." It's an engineering
technique for transferring data twice, or 4 times for quad, per clock
cycle.

333 is the bus cycle rate, e.g. "Bus Speed," and is the relevant number
from a performance standpoint.

I don't see much point in arguing this one in technical terms.

The fact is the term 'FSB' was used for many years to refer to the
memory/processor bus *clock frequency*, and reusing the same term for
the bus *bit rate* has caused no end of confusion and was therefore a
Bad Idea (tm).

One could also argue that use of the term 'hertz' (as in MHz) in
reference to anything other than the periodic interval of a waveform is
incorrect. Heinrich Rudolf is probably spinning in his grave :-)

Intel themselves can't even get it straight: If you look up P3
processors at processorfinder.intel.com, 'Bus Speed' x 'Bus/Core Ratio'
= 'Processor Frequency', but the same calculation yields a number 4x
bigger than it should be when you look up 'pumped' processors.

The maximum that the processor will run at depends on many things. If
it's
un-locked you would be able to lower the multiplier and run it on a
200MHz
FSB, however if its one of the more recent locked models the maximum FSB
would be in the region of 175-190MHz, depending on how overclockable
the cpu
is, how good your cooling is etc.


He didn't ask what speed he might be able to push it to. He asked "What
is the maximum that the Athlon XP 2800+ supports?" and the "Maximum
System Bus Speed" that the processor "supports" is the bus speed it's
rated for.