(FSB) The
bus via which a
processor
communicates with its
RAM and
chipset; one half of the
Dual Independent Bus, the other half being the
backside bus. The
L2 cache is usually on the FSB, unless it is on
the same chip as the processor
In
PCI systems, the PCI bus runs at half the FSB speed.
Intel's Pentium 60 processor used a bus speed and
processor speed of 60
MHz. All later processors have used
multipliers to increase the internal
clock speed while
maintaining the same external clock speed, e.g. the Pentium 90 used a 1.5x multiplier. Modern
Socket 370
motherboards support multipliers from 4.5x to 8.0x, and FSB
speeds from 50 MHz to a proposed 83 MHz standard. These
higher speeds may cause problems with some PCI hardware.
Altering the FSB speed and the multiplier ratio are the two
main ways of
overclocking processors.
Toms Hardware - The Bus Speed Guide.
Toms Hardware - The Overclocking Guide.