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Generic RAM vs. Name Brand question

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XunknownX

Disabled
Joined
Jul 12, 2003
Location
Palmdale, CA
What's up my fellow forum buddies?

Alright, several months ago when I was building my system I picked up some generic PC2700 ram from PCClub. I got 3 sticks of 256mb to make a total of 768mb.

So here's what I did. A guy I'm building a system for wanted a lot of RAM. So he is taking my 768mb of generic ram and replacing it with 2x256 of the OCZ PC3200 DDR400 EL Edition Dual Channel Memory with silver heat spreaders. That's a mouth full.

Now my question is, will I see a significant performance increase even though I'm losing 256mb? Currently my FSB is at 333. However, I have a Barton 2500+ so with the PC3200 I'm hoping to bust out an FSB of 400. So that's another possible performance increase.
 
the 400 mhz fsb will definitely be a noticeable gain compared to the 256 mb of ram you lost, but my guess is you could have probably pushed your other, generic, ram to near 400 mhz too, you'll just (probably) have more headroom with the 3200.
 
Ya, you should be a gain in most things but with if you edit large pictures or play some games that load a LOT of stuff into the memory you might notice a decrease in preformance. (this is assuming that you do raise the FSB and put it at better timings)

The issue isn't that it's generic it's that the timings and FSB are just slower though (so you could have gotten generic PC3200 that runs at good timings and would see the same increase in preformance).
 
I don't know much about timings but I know the lower the CAS the better. As for my PC2700, I could only up the FSB like 5mhz before it became unstable. A friend told me to do 5:4 and I got it up to 195mhz, but I don't understand how that works. So I thought I'd play it safe and just take the opportunity to get new ram. Here are 2 spec's from the OCZ

Built with hand picked OCZ brand EL DDR IC (4.5 ns)

CL 2-2-3-5 <-----is this good?
 
Those timings are pretty good, but if you have the money you might wanna invest in some Mushkin black lvl 2 or somthing, mega OCer... Anything with BH-5 really (check out the thread in this section). But I don't know if your motherboard could dream of using it's speed or not (Dunno how good of a OCer it is) so maybe some cheaper stuff with good timings is better. For timings the lower the number the better (2-2-2-5 is pretty much the lowest so those are pretty darned good).
 
can u actually push a generic PC2700 up to 400mhz? that sounds a little impossibel for me. PC2700 only runs at 333mhz, pushing about 70 mhz up is very high for a generic brand to do. but i might be wrong, most people in here only talks about PC3200 and above :)
 
warlock110 said:
can u actually push a generic PC2700 up to 400mhz? that sounds a little impossibel for me. PC2700 only runs at 333mhz, pushing about 70 mhz up is very high for a generic brand to do. but i might be wrong, most people in here only talks about PC3200 and above :)

Its actualy only 34mhz... 333 is 166 doubled, so it's really only 166 to 200. But it is pretty rare to see and you shouldn't count on it.

(how does that apply though?)
 
You pay for what you get. I got generic ram that is holding back my overclock. Now I am getting some good ram. If the rule applies, I'll get what I paid for. I'll post benchmarks from PCmark after all is said and done.
 
CrashOveride said:


Its actualy only 34mhz... 333 is 166 doubled, so it's really only 166 to 200. But it is pretty rare to see and you shouldn't count on it.

(how does that apply though?)

...forgot it's DDR, dumb me :D
 
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