[mani1987]

How do they all relate? And how do I get the most out of my machine? Also if I mix DDR 266 and DDR 333 ram on this machine wil I loose performance.

[PRIYA]

1st: The motherboard bus, by this do you mean the main bus?
The main bus has all conncections from other buses flowing into it, think of it as the main river and all the little creaks, rivers, and streams flowing into the big Mississipi. Except the flow goes both ways.

2nd: FSB - Front Side Bus - this is realy a timing bus that controls the memory and cpu clock speed, it is a special circit that contians the crystial and special support IC's to maintain the clock speed. This timing circut can be tapped by other buses to control thier speed but can not request a change of the FSB speed. You can however change this speed if the control circuit is accesable through hardware jumpers or Software, such as the BIOS Settings.

3rd: If you mix ram with different FSB speeds the system will either not start, function erraticly or even burn up the slower ram.