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newb memory q's

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splat

ASCII Moderator
Joined
Apr 6, 2002
i built my first pc 6 months ago now, and i was thinking about upgrading ram before i go back to school. I've been reading thru the forum to see if i could find answers to any of teh uestions i had but haven't found anything really. I'm running 256 pc2100 basic mushkin ddr right now with my p4 [email protected] on asus p4b266 motherboard. of course i want to get more performance but i don't want to just assume that getting the fastest and biggest stick i can will do the best for me. i know that mushkin has pc2100 basic, special, and hi perf. looking thru their pages i can't really see a difference between any of them. when i originally purchased my memory in january, i asked the guy on the phone what he thought and all i can remember him saying is that there really isn't much difference between them. i noticed another thread talking about the frequencies, and it made me wonder if i moved up to pc2700, would I beable to utilize all the speed? I think i have my pc running at a fsb of 111. I have been able to overclock more but this is the most stable. do u think that my pc2100 ram might have been causing the instability i got by running at a higher fsb? so then pc2700 would fix that? also i was thinking of upgrading from win2k to winxp pro this weekend because for some odd reason i am missing the "advanced" tab where i should beable to set my dvd drive to DMA. that should be another thread all itself and i won't get in to it here.. but will moving up to 512mb ram improve performance in xp? i've seen other threads that have conflicting views so i guess asking the question here might be useless.

any way, that should be enough to keep u guys busy...hehe
 
I believe you are using a "willy" P4, it was built on 0.18um process and capped out at around 2.2Ghz, so it's not the ram holding you back, I heard stories that Mushkin high pref pc2100 running at 183Mhz with most agreesive timings, your ram should be fine running at least 150Mhz and maybe more. It depends on your motherboard to run ram higher than FSB, I don't know much about your mobo but I think moving to pc2700 will not help you, as you can see, you are running the pc2100 (default 133Mhz) at 111Mhz. you should probably check the mobo manual to see if you can run your ram at higher speeds. You'll see a great performance boost moving from 256mb to 512mb, as winxp eats at least 100mb ram just to boot up.
 
i meant i have my cpu at 111 fsb, i'm not sure what my mem is running at but i think i have the 4:3 ration set in my bios. i should probably reboot to make sure, but I think thats the default, and i think theres only 4:3 and 1:1 options.
 
i rebooted and checked my settings just to be positive, i am running my cpu at 111 fsb, and my memory is set to auto which i'm asuming is 4:3, as there is only 4:3 and 1:1 other than the auto.
 
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