Bus speed

[Steve_J]

Several questions, probably dumb ones, regarding bus speed.

When refering to "the bus" are we refering to the path between the RAM, the ROM, and the processor only or something else?

Do accelerator cards increase the bus speed or just the processor?

Is there someplace I can find out the bus speed of various Macs?

[Gary S]

Steve,

The bus speed is set and doesn't change.
I may be wrong but I don't think you can overclock it.

I don't know of any accelerator cards that will change the bus speed.
A processor upgrade will just make your processor faster.

Same goes for a Video card.

You can find out bus speeds here:

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/index.html
 
 [ 03-13-2003, 11:11 AM: Message edited by: Gary S ]

[kelly]

There's a different Bus for different things.  

Get's pretty confusing.

http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/bussed.html

http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/pipesInternal.html

The one you're asking about, like Gary says, won't change.

GURU includes Bus Speed info.

[tacit]

To expand a bit:

In generic terms, a "bus" is a set of wires that connect the computer's processor to anything else. Your computer has a "memory bus," that connects the processor to RAM; a "front side bus," that connects the processor to the cache; a "PCI bus," that connects the computer's processor to PCI cards; and so on.

Depending on the particular model of computer, some of these busses may or may not be overclockable. For example, on many PCI Power macs, the clock that runs the processor also drives the memory bus; it is possible, on some models of computer (like a Blue and White G3), to increase the speed of both the processor and the memory bus.

Most upgrade cards increase the processor's speed only. Some upgrade cards also speed up the memory bus. Speeding up the bus is a dangerous thing to do, because the RAM may not be fast enough to keep up.