Should I upgrade to pc2700?

[Aziatic]

In the future Im going to upgrade my video card to either a radeon 9700 or a geforce 4 and I was wondering if my pc2100 ram would be a bottleneck. Also I just recently built my new pc and bought my crucial 2100 at the same time as all my other parts so I don't really want to spend an extra 100+ dollars to buy new ram, but if Moving to 2700 would really improve my performance to noticable levels then I would be willing to upgrade. Oh and one more thing, Im using an older hard drive from my previous pc Im almost positive its a 5400 I bought it when I built my pentium 3 750 pc. Should this be upgraded also or am I ok with using it still? Thnx for any help provided.

[i_like_penguins]

right now i am running pc2100 ram. see my sig for the rest of my system. i am running a gf4 mx440, dont rember if i updated my cig, but anyway. One problem that i am having is that the hdd is the limiting factor. from what i understand this is a very common problem. a faster hdd will not translate into higher fps in gaming but will lead to faster loading of the os and games. if you are using the 1600 proc that is in your sig, than you might not be able to take advantage of the faster ram. that is just a guess and i could easily be wrong. hope this helps.

[Wedo]

I have recently started installing the Western Digital 100GB special edition 7200RPM HD's which have an 8MB cache (vs. the normal 2MB) and that has continued to show a significant increase in speed for all my machines.

I have moslty AMD XP's, from 1600-1800's, and various types of RAM ranging from pc2100-pc2700. I agree with i_like, the HD will not bring up the frame rates, but it will make everything load faster and access times are significantly reduced.

Also, you can get the drives at Newegg, they also have the 80GB variety for $107.

So to answer your question, no, your HD will be the bottle-neck in your system.

Wedo

[Aziatic]

so my athlon xp 1600 wont really show any performance increase by moving to 2700? If this is the case then Ill just go for a new hard drive sometime in the future and stick to purchasing another 256mb stick of crucial pc2100 to get to 512mb of ram.

[youngbuck]

PC2700 'might' show an increase of a only few FPS, but it most likely wouldn't be worth it.

One thing is for sure in my system, the HDD is a MASSIVE BOTTLENECK, and a WD Special Edition 80GB is my next computer purchase.

-YB

[hduong]

I wouldn't unless your o/c'ing. I only upgraded to pc2700 from pc133 cause I needed the head room for o/c'ing. Performance wise it is not worth it.

[james.miller]

its not worth it if your not overclocking.
however if you are, there are huge gains to be made from it

[mjones73]

Yeah like james said if you plan to overclock and push your FSB higher you can take advantage of the higher memory bus speeds the PC2700 will make available to you, if your not gonna overclock don't waste your money. All you get when you go to a higher DDR number like PC2700 is the ability for the ram to handle more memory bandwidth. If you don't increase the bandwidth by overclocking then your memory is still gonna run at PC2100 speeds.