As the title says, I've searched through the forums and online and I can't seem to find a good answer to this question. I know that microsoft pretty much got all of the ram even those that weren't up to standard all so that they could get them cheaper. And this is also why it was so easy to hack the thing. But anyway, is there any easy way to test what speed my ram's able to get up to? I haven't noticed games lagging much(admittedly it's been many many years ago since I last playd games on it), but I'd still like to know what sort of speed I'm dealing with.
If your Xbox is modified you could boot up one of the Xbox-Linux distributions and test the ram speed using a Hardware Benchmarq app. I don't really use Linux a lot and never tested it myself but in theorie it should work!
There's no easy way. On top of that, it wouldn't do you any good. Memory timing information is held in the BIOS. There's no SPD mechanism like on PC to dynamically change timing settings of the RAM. The fixed timing table in BIOS contains "safe-enough" values so that every memory module following the DDR200 memory performance convention will work. Maybe MS went even a little "safer" in their values to allow out of specs chips to work. Anyway, the point is that even if you had a top of the line quality chips that could go way faster than DDR200, it wouldn't react any differently than poor quality chips because the memory timing information is the same for all. The system will access chips using the same timing logic for every Xbox revision(ie it'll wait the same amount of time between each operation) EXCEPT 1.6b which uses Hynix RAM and have timing profile slightly altered. So from a functionnal point of view, every Xbox made has equal RAM because they all run using the same timing logic; except 1.6B or course. The only way to change that is either by modifying the BIOS timing table in your BIOS or modify the linux base system(it's got to be there around somewhere since the Xbox doesn't have a proper PC BIOS to do it for him). The easiest way would be by modifying linux but when I say "easiest" I mean it would be the less extremely hard way of doing it.
With such little ram, I doubt timings will be revelant... being such cheap memory I doubt they'll even support any other timings hah
From what I read, microsoft including a testing program inside of the BIOS to see what speed would work for the ram chips as they were buying and thus tested the ram chips until they got a speed that would work both of them and then used that. This is based upon hearing that some games ran better on other xbox's than other ones. Edit: I saw it on some post I can't remember who, I think it might've been xbox on linux, or maybe xbmc folks. And they talked about how microsoft was only using rc4 because they were short on space, and then decided to use TEA(tiny encryption algorithm) for it later on, and how the bios had all of theses tests to find a save clock for them. Edit 2: here it is. As I thought xbox-linux had the information. https://web.archive.org/web/2010061...n_the_Xbox_Security_System#RAM_Initialization It clearly states that the system finds a stable clock for the ram chips and then sets teh clocks at that, and then that changes how well a game will run on the system.
OK, I swear my previous post was just deleted for no reason. Anyway I posted saying right here it is, the original xbox has a program to test the clocks of the ram speed. https://web.archive.org/web/2010061...n_the_Xbox_Security_System#RAM_Initialization
If you go to xbox-linux, and look at the 17 reasons, they clearly state that the original xbox had a progarm that downclocked the ram until it was stable or it couldn't go any lower, during it's startup when it loaded the bootrom to do the initalization with teh boot loader to know taht all was well.
