# AMD HT link myth uncovered!



## itsakjt (Apr 28, 2014)

So I have seen that many users having AMD systems ask whether increasing the HT Link frequency increases performance because they have not seen any and in fact most people haven't. All these days, we knew that HT link is related to the CPU-memory communication speed. But instead, it is the CPU/NB frequency increase which increases the performance and not the HT link. True. 

But ever wondered what it actually does? 

If you ask me, the HT link determines the CPU-PCIE link speed! So here goes two screenshots:

At HT link 1870 MHz:







At HT link 2337 MHz:






Look at the memory read and write speeds especially the read speed. That has increased a lot. The memory copy speed has also increased but we can ignore it since it is between graphics memory to memory. But the memory reads and writes are between GPU and CPU. So yeah, HT link definitely increases performance and I hope this will clear a lot of confusions people have whether to overclock the HT link or not. All the best and happy overclocking.


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## d1nky (Apr 28, 2014)

A lot of people using AMD systems will know what the hyper-transport system does, its the link between cpu and northbridge (NB which connects to your GPU/southbridge/HDD's. Which when overclocked will have an effect on the GPU/Vram speeds. And also your HDD/SSD speeds!

The cpu northbridge (with memory controller) obviously has effect on mem speeds. 

People tend to get the 2 confused or think that the HT is still associated with memory as that was how old platforms operated. 

This is useful if trying to ease bottlenecks from CPU bound systems


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## itsakjt (Apr 28, 2014)

d1nky said:


> A lot of people using AMD systems will know what the hyper-transport system does, its the link between cpu and northbridge (NB which connects to your GPU/southbridge/HDD's. Which when overclocked will have an effect on the GPU/Vram speeds. And also your HDD/SSD speeds!
> 
> The cpu northbridge (with memory controller) obviously has effect on mem speeds.
> 
> ...



I had that confusion actually. Didn't know the HT link is actually tied to the CPU-PCIE/ CPU-SATA bandwidth. So shared it here. Will edit that sentence in my post.


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## erocker (Apr 28, 2014)

The HT link speeds do little to nothing in terms of performance. Overclocking the CPU/NB (IMC) does. You can OC the IMC without OC'ing HTT.. which is more ideal than doing both.


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## itsakjt (Apr 28, 2014)

erocker said:


> The HT link speeds do little to nothing in terms of performance. Overclocking the CPU/NB (IMC) does. You can OC the IMC without OC'ing HTT.. which is more ideal than doing both.


All these days I did that only and it increases memory performance. Its also listed on my system specs. But the HT link is also important especially when the CPU is old and you use a good GPU with it just like at this moment I am using the R9 270X with an AMD Phenom II X4 955 CPU overclocked as on specs. There is some bottleneck but most games run at atleast 50-60 FPS on almost highest to highest settings at 1080p. So it does the job. And HT link slightly increased the performance too.


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