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New to OC, question about RAM compatibility

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STONEMIT

New Member
Joined
Oct 23, 2005
Hi,

This will be my first time OCing and building a pc. I tore apart my old dell dimension 4500, and will be building a new pc mostly from scratch. I have three questions, but first here are the details:

I've ordered:
AMD 64 3800+BV Athlon X2 CPU
ASUS A8N-SLI NF4 mb
eVGA 7800GTX
2X Corsair 512mb DDR 400 SDRAM
and will house it in an ASPIRE XNavigator ATXA8NW-AL case with a 500w power supply.

I plan on putting in my old 80gb WD Caviar HD @7200rpm, and am debating whether to put in a stick of my old 266mhz 512mb DDR Ram.

I hope to OC the cpu to around 2.6gghz (2.0gghz unclocked). I plan to primarily game on this computer. 1) Would the added benefits of having an extra 512mb ram outweigh the disadvantage of running my 3 sticks at a lower speed (i.e. 133mhz FSB for all 3 sticks instead of 200 FSB for just the two corsairs)? Also, would you reccommend overclocking the memory?

2) will I need a better heatsink/cooling system (the case has 5 80mm fans already)?

3) Would there be any benefit to OC the video card?

Advice regarding any of the questions posed would be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance for your help!
 
if you want to oc properly then i would loose the asus board and get some ocz memory
 
I've already ordered the parts and I'm not looking to OC too hard. Will the ASUS board prevent me from doing modest overclocking?
 
Are you saying that you want to put in your generic stick of 266mhz 512mb in addition to your two 400mhz Corsair 512mb? I would advise against this strongly. I'm more of an intel person, but I've heard many times that running memory dividers on AMD platforms isn't very cool (that is, not running the ram syncrously to the FSB).
 
Ram dividers work quite well on A64 systems. It was the old XP's where dividers were a problem as they slowed your system down. You can use a divider and keep the 266 ram but you will lose dual channel. You are much better off withthe 2x512 at 400MHz. The Asus is not a good overclocker and I'm not sure you'll ever see 2.6, but even a modest upgrade plus the dual core CPU will make for excellent performance. I would suggest you see where you can go with your OC on stock cooling as you may find that it's not going to clock high enough to warrant the extra expense. Many of the X2's come with a heatpipe stock cooler that is pretty decent. Good luck with it.

I forgot, :welcome: to the Forum!
 
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