Need a bit of help building a giant

Hello folks, been a lurker for quite a few weeks now and you all have inspired me to spend and irrational amount of money on a new system. I'm fairly new to overclocking but in theory I want to take this next creation of mine over the 4 gig mark if possible. My problem is ram and I don't know jack. I've read the faq's several times but there's only so much words can do, I've got to tinker with it to understand it.

My specs:
Thermaltake Xaser III Super Tower
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
Ati Radeon 9800 Pro
D1 p4 3.0 slk6wu 30 cap

I'm a heavy gamer if that's of any relevance but I want this system to smoke, as I understand it the wu's can almost reach 4.0 on air with a little luck and that's my goal. At the moment money is of no object even if I end up eating tunafish for the next month straight. Any help would be appreciated cause I'm at a loss here.

Frizhead said:

Hello folks, been a lurker for quite a few weeks now and you all have inspired me to spend and irrational amount of money on a new system. I'm fairly new to overclocking but in theory I want to take this next creation of mine over the 4 gig mark if possible. My problem is ram and I don't know jack. I've read the faq's several times but there's only so much words can do, I've got to tinker with it to understand it.

My specs:
Thermaltake Xaser III Super Tower
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
Ati Radeon 9800 Pro
D1 p4 3.0 slk6wu 30 cap

I'm a heavy gamer if that's of any relevance but I want this system to smoke, as I understand it the wu's can almost reach 4.0 on air with a little luck and that's my goal. At the moment money is of no object even if I end up eating tunafish for the next month straight. Any help would be appreciated cause I'm at a loss here.

Click to expand...

well your case sounds pretty good has alot of airflow so thats a plus ....your Mobo is def a plus...props....you have the best video card out besides the XT but you can OC your VC to XT speeds so no biggie.....as for your CPU yes its tru the SL6WU does get pretty high clock speeds..and if you plan to hit 4GHZ go with a prometeia Mach 1 and get it its own Switching power supply....temp will be below -20 for sure.....now for the memory....its best to get memory to run in sync with the CPU...and at the speed you are tryn to aquire some Komusa A-data Pc-4200 would be your best bet....that memory gives you ALOT of head room a little volts..but if you want tight timming which isnt an issue for anything to me then get some mushkin pc3200 and run it at 5:4 divider with a bit more volts mayb even doing a Vdimm mod to your board which is tremendously easy...

With that CPU, you could push the FSB pretty high probably. In that case, you should go with a memory that can hang. For Gaming, go with 1GB. I recommend these(see post #11). Good luck deciding.

Since you seem to be wanting to go with an air-cooling set-up, I would doubt that you would be seeing 4GHz. Despite that, a 3.0C is probably the Intel processor to get now, and you will most likely see an overall clock speed of 3.6-3.8GHz. This would give you an FSB range of about 230-250MHz.

With this FSB range, you would likely want to see something that offers you mid-range timings, like 2.5-3-3 or 3-3-3 (CAS Latency - RAS-to-CAS Delay - RAS Precharge), at DDR460-DDR500 speeds.

There are several ways to get memory that suits this FSB range nicely, but none are optimum.

1) OCZ's PC-3200/PC-3500 Enhanced-Bandwidth or OCZ's PC-3700 Gold Rev. 2 could offer you something nice and new to play with, in hopes of achieving likable performance. OCZ's new memory is offering nice low-latency, but also comes with a very-high premium price.

2) Because your looking at a FSB range of around DDR500, doesn't necessarally mean that you would want PC-4000. Basically all PC-4000+ use the same memory chips (and therefore will be likely identical in average performance). Some of this memory (using memory chips from Hynix - www.hynix.com) could see rather high clock-speeds (230MHz+) with "mid-grade" timings, though it also might not.

3) And always, there's still some memory out there with Winbond BH-5 chips (although basically all would now be available only through second-hand sources now) that offers great potential with a good motherboard and high DIMM voltage. Mushkin "222" Special" PC-3200 can be had at a premium price and does have Winbond BH-6 chips in it. Expect decent performance out of these with 2.85V on an Asus P4C800-E, but you may not be able to get the 230MHz+ you might want without modifying the motherboard to increase DIMM voltage beyond 2.85V.

Thanks for the imput fellas, still no clue what i'm gonna do but now I'm looking up water cooling, gonna have to sell my dv cam for the mach 1