Budget RAM

OK, who thinks that the high-end RAM makes a large difference if not overclocking?

I am building up my dually rig (used for graphics and video, mainly Photoshop and Preimiere) and am moving to 1GB of RAM. As a Best Buy employee, I can get K-Byte RAM really cheap. Is the PC2700 K-byte gonna make any concessions to say, some Mushkin or GEiL in this specific application?

If you not going to OC...then go with Kingston Value Ram...it is better then K-Byte ram...uses better memory chips then K-Byte...and if you do decied to OC later on...Value ram will still be nice for OCing...and no you wont see a big difference...really if any...from the main brands...unless they are like 5-2-2 cas 2.0 ram...and if running at 166FSB or below Kingston Value Ram will run at those timings...K-Byte might have a problem running at 5-2-2 cas 2.0...As far as I know...BB sells the Kingston PC2700 Value Ram also

Yeah, we do, but our pricing (employee) is based on markup. K-Byte has a huge markup. Anyhow, the timings will be important to this rig. Thx for the info

Go with the GEIL

For me it outperformed the Corsair XMS LL and it is quite a bit cheaper

Or maybe go with Samsung PC2700... it's one of the cheapest PC2700 out there, and as you can see by my sig, it doesn't have major problems overclocking. (no, it's not maxed out)

Only problem is that the RAM timings are a bit conservative (default CAS is even 2.5 ) so you'd have to change those to get it to perform as well as most other RAM. Not sure if that counts as overclocking.

If you buy Samsung memory, and want to perform worth its salt, be sure its "CCC" stuff. Finding this stuff as cheap as the generic-built (Samsung-Chip) stuff will be hard though.

Is this a dual AMD system? Well, since dual AMDs rarely go over 155fsb, cheap pc2700 should be perfectly wonderful.

since you work for bestbuy i would def go wiht the kbyte you'll save a whole bunch compared to the expensive stuff online =d and doing graphics stuff teh more ram the better

Thx for all the advice guys. I went with 1Gig of K-byte, running it at CAS 2, all for about $30.

I used to think that Kingston was better, but most of the last few Kingston ValueRAM modules I bought had no-name chips with nothing but "32M x 8 -- 7 -- T" printed on them, and some, including those with Hynix chips, flunked both Gold Memory 5.07 and MemTest86 (v. 1.4 and 3.0), even at the slowest settings, unless I slowed the memory bus. All of the bad ones said "ASSY IN CHINA" on their stickers, but so did some of the good ones, but all of the "ASSY IN USA" moduels were good.

I've had better luck with K-byte, even though all of them had second grade chips on them, like Spectec (used, from Micron) or Mystic (Nanya, probably used). One of the Spectecs failed, but all of the Mystics worked. One thing I hate about K-byte is the jerk who answers their phones. Whenever I asked him a question, he'd ask me, "What's your question?" He also tried to BS me, such as by claiming that there were over 10,000 memory chip manufacturers (not memory module manufacturers, chip manufacturers).

Of the brands commonly sold by Best Buy, Staples, etc., in my limited experience the best may be PNY because they seem to always use chips with the brands on them and sometimes get the entire modules from the chip manufacturers. I don't know about overclocking, though.