Helping a forum n00b, whats it all about?

[Spook75]

Ok, I am a new person here, obviously and I have some questions. I will be upgrading soon from a 1800XP on an ASUS A7V133 utilizing 512MB RAM (PC133) to the same xp1800 to an Nforce2 board (not sure which one). I need to know, whats all this about asynchronus/synchronus memory thing, CAS latency, timings and all that. You see, I wonder what the fastest kind of RAM will work on it. Would PC2700 RAM be wasted if the CPU is stuck at 266FSB, or would it behoove me to go to a faster RAM? I am not a big overclocker, but I would like to run my CPU at an even 1.6GHz, so would it be best to go with lower latency PC2100? I am under the impression that the Force boards will run faster if I use 2 sticks of RAM rather than 1, correct?
I guess i just want to know what the common concensus would be to run a rig like that at optimum speed. Again, I thank you for the help ahead of time.

[KCN]

ok not sure if all that im about to say is entirely right but if it isnt please someone correct me insted of flaming!
sync/async is the speed that the fsb/ram runs at, the main point of the nforce2 is that the fsb,ram and agp can all be ran async, which maeans if you want to run your cpu at the even 1600 that you say but still run 3200 ram (or2700 (or even 2100)) you can but still leave your agp and pci cards in spec (or slightly out (if you know they can take it)) cas latency is to do with the timings you run the ram at http://www.sysopt.com/articles/latency/ looks like a good place to find out about the tech parts of it but lower is genrally better. 2 sticks of ram will work better on these boards but if you keep your fsb realitivly low ther emight be a bottle kneck at lower ram speeds but i ndon't know where that golden ratio is for these boards.
hope that helped
Nic

[daddyof2]

Kcn that sound about right. Nice post. And by the way, no one gets flamed here. Unless they are talking about how great Bill Gates is. :D

[WyrmMaster]

However, there is hardly any performance gain from running async FSB and RAM. You need to increase them equally to get a good gain out of it.