A front side bus, or FSB for short, is a computer component that transfers data between the CPU and RAM. The faster your FSB can transfer data from one of these two components to the other, the faster your computer will be able to process commands and execute programs. In this article we’ll look at how an FSB works and discuss some ways you can speed up its performance if it’s slowing down your PC.
Table of Contents
What Does the Front Side Bus Do?
When you send a command to your computer, the CPU processes it and then sends that information along to RAM. The FSB is what transfers data between these two components of your system.
Since the speed at which this transfer occurs will determine how fast programs can run on your machine, tweaking things like clock speeds or voltage settings in order to increase the speed of your FSB can have a huge effect on computer performance.
How Does the Front Side Bus Work?
An FSB is not actually one single, solitary wire. Instead, it’s several different wires all bundled together within a larger cable that are used to transfer data between two components in an electronic system, like the CPU and RAM mentioned above.
Because there are so many different kinds of connections between these parts (in essence making “wires” out of each connection), they’re referred to as buses instead of singular cables or wires.
This also explains why some people refer to this bus as being 64-bits wide since you need at least that number of individual lines for binary processing purposes – using higher numbers simply provides more bandwidth which will allow for more data to be transferred at once.
While it’s not possible to speed up an FSB that is already running as fast as it can, there are some ways you might be able to increase its performance if your computer seems slow or lags when trying to run certain programs.
What Can I Do About a Slow FSB?
If your motherboard has settings in the BIOS section which determine how fast the front side bus runs (some don’t give this option), then try increasing the clock speeds – however, only do so by small amounts since too much of an increase will simply cause problems with stability.
Next, make sure all drivers are updated and any software on your system which may have become corrupted is removed/replaced/repaired.
If you’re still having issues, then it’s time to replace the FSB with a larger one . This is not something that can be done easily at home and should only be considered if all other options have been exhausted.
Is a Front Side Bus Still Used?
Modern computer architecture has largely phased out the FSB, which was once common in computers from 1990s to early 2000s.They’ve evolved a lot since the days of the first Pentium processors.
Nowadays there’s an integrated memory controller on almost every CPU which means that components like RAM don’t have to go through as much processing before being transferred – this is one reason why newer CPUs tend to run faster.
In addition, it’s possible to get a motherboard with dual front side buses which can run simultaneously and transfer more data at once making for even faster computer performance.
