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Best RAM for P5WD2 Premium with an 830?

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wangjaroni

Registered
Joined
May 8, 2004
Need some advice on the best RAM for this puppy (that won't break the bank).

I saw this at mushkin which is probably borderline for how much I want to spend: http://www.mushkin.com/doc/products/memory_detail.asp?ID=230

One other thing I'm worried about is that many people say that if you use the wrong RAM on all four DIMMs that the machine won't boot. The list of accepted RAM at the ASUS site is very limited and doubtful that only Kingston and Samsung memory works.

Can anyone advise? I'll be putting 2 gigs in there (to start with). Want to have the option for 4 total later (so I'll be avoiding 512meg sticks)

Thanks in advance
 
well, dividers don't really boost performance so there's really no point in spending too much on the ram. what cpu do you have and what do you expect it to clock at? then you can figure out the max fsb you will run hence the max ram speed. that mushkin is very good but will probably be overkill for you. the ram in my sig is very popular because it's a great value.
 
If you're going to spend $200 on 1GB of DDR, you won't go wrong with the Mushkin 6400. They do have 2x1GB pack of those (for more $$ :)), but they were (are?) on back-order for a long time and I don't know if they are available yet. Like crimedog says, there are other decent brands out there that you could pick up twice the capacity for the same $$ as the Mushkin. If I was going for 2GB+, I would've looked for something cheaper myself.

I have not heard about not being able to run 4 sticks? In fact, I could've sworn that I saw 4 sticks of Corsair in a P5WD2 and not only did it work just fine, it didn't negatively effect the OC at all, which might normally be more the case.
 
wangjaroni said:
Can anyone advise? I'll be putting 2 gigs in there (to start with). Want to have the option for 4 total later (so I'll be avoiding 512meg sticks)

Populating all four DIMM slots on a motherboard puts a high capacitive load on the memory controllers. That load, in turn, can have a negative effect on the signal quality and hence hurt the ability of the system as a whole of opperating at very high clock speeds. So it's important to use high quality DIMM's when you want 4Gb.

I'm going down this path myself, and seem to have a good stable system with 4Gb of OCZ Gold DDR2-667MHz chips rated at 4-4-4-8. They're just over $600 for 4 sticks at NewEgg, with a $33 rebate right now.

I've just bumped the FSB up to 240MHz and it's running Prime95 without problems; memory is at 720MHz (didn't post at DDR2-800).

So far, so good :)
 
1gb sticks of the mushkin are actually cheaper (per gb) than the 512mb sticks
2x512 for $188
2x1gb for $331

it's definitely the best ram out (i'm not counting the corsair since it got so expensive) but with an 830 it's extremely hard to run 4+ghz without freezing the chip, and at the 14x multi that's only about 285mhz which is ddr2-570 which is BELOW pc2-5400 speeds (at 1:1 ratio).

i run 14x300 1:1 4-4-4-8 daily and am very happy with having ram that costs about $80/gig. fugger at xtreme systems has run 4gb of this pqi at about 390mhz ddr2-780 @ stock timings in this motherboard, so no worries about that :)
pqi link
 
This is probably a newbie question but I'll throw it out.

What is the benefit of buying lower speed RAM (to start out at). I know you guys OC it and etc, but what's the downside of buying native PC2 6400 RAM in the first place?
 
wangjaroni said:
This is probably a newbie question but I'll throw it out.

What is the benefit of buying lower speed RAM (to start out at). I know you guys OC it and etc, but what's the downside of buying native PC2 6400 RAM in the first place?

nothing's wrong with buying faster ram ;) believe me if i had any money i would have bought 2x512 of that mushkin.

however, when you're talking about a normal user's system (not for benchmarking) there's no point in spending twice as much on ram when you will not even max out the slower ram. ddr2 is a different ballgame from ddr1.
 
I'm assuming that when I OC (and I'll only do a small OC..maybe push the 3.0 to 3.6), I thought I had to match the speed on the ram to the speed supported by the mobo?

That was my initial guess as to why people were buying slower ram...

Looks like what you are saying disproves my newbie guess...people are just going for the best bang for the buck so they get the cheapest ram they can afford that is still overclockable... :shrug:
 
alright, well let's assume you overclock your 830 to 3.6ghz and turn on speedstep to minimum for a 14x multi (stock is 15x).
3600mhz = 14x257
so, fsb = 257mhz

if you run a 1:1 ratio (not necessary, but there isn't much of a real world gain by running a divider to make the ram run faster) you're running the ram at ddr514.

pc3200 = ddr400
YOU = ddr514
pc4200 = ddr532
pc5400 = ddr666
pc6400 = ddr800
pc8000 = ddr1000

if you run 15x you're only talking ddr480. so, tell me what the point of buying the best ram out there is (it does ddr1000+) for twice as much as some ddr666 that will be way more than enough (i've tested it up to ddr740)?
 
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crimedog said:
alright, well let's assume you overclock your 830 to 3.6ghz and turn on speedstep to minimum for a 14x multi (stock is 15x).
3600mhz = 14x257
so, fsb = 257mhz

if you run a 1:1 ratio (not necessary, but there isn't much of a real world gain by running a multiplier to make the ram run faster) you're running the ram at ddr514.

Interesting - I did read there wasn't much gain in running memory at DDR2-667MHz vs. say DDR2-533MHz (maybe 1-2% increase in bandwidth), not sure why that's the case though.

As I mentioned above, I have an 830 with 4Gb of OCZ PC2-5400 sticks. Played with OC'ing today, at 240MHz FSB I had the RAM at DDR2-720MHz, so using the 2:3 ratio - it wouldn't POST at DDR2-800MHz. I boosted the FSB to 260Mhz (15x multi for 3.9GHz) and I think the RAM was probably at 650MHz (4:5 ratio).

Sandra Memory Bandwidth scores at 240FSB/DDR2-730 were of course about 20% higher than stock, and going to 260FSB/DDR2-650 boosted the scores a little bit more which was interesting - I was wondering what running the RAM at a lower MHz would do, looks like the FSB boost is the important thing here, am I right?

As long as I can run at even a 1:1 ratio, I'll get a real-world performance gain when raising the CPU FSB? My system is used mainly for digital imaging (Photoshop CS2), so "performance" is in context of that.

Now, why lower the multi to 14x vs. 15x? Is that to allow you to run the FSB as high as possible?

Thanks for all the info!!
 
running ram faster is always better... but you're not gonna see much of a performance boost using a divider. i run 14x to run ram faster at 1:1 ratio.
 
When you say "divider", you're talking about the FSB : DRAM ratio? And usually the RAM is run at a faster frequency than the FSB right - like 3:5, 4:5 etc? So why run at 1:1 - how is that the fastest?
 
Catul said:
When you say "divider", you're talking about the FSB : DRAM ratio? And usually the RAM is run at a faster frequency than the FSB right - like 3:5, 4:5 etc? So why run at 1:1 - how is that the fastest?

yes, divider is fsb:ram. it's not faster to run 1:1! you just dont see much benifit by running a divider. again, there is very little benifit by running a divider to make your ram faster than the fsb. the point of which being, why spend twice as much on ram if there's only a tiny performance increase.
 
Ok, makes sense. So, to get the best performance out of my system (and using 4 DIMM's will make overclocking a little harder), I should push the FSB as high as I can and keep the RAM at 1:1 to allow this high FSB (since there's not much benefit to using the ratio/divider and running the RAM even faster)?

I'm thinkng if I can be stable at 15x 260MHz FSB (and the RAM will run at 520MHz no problem), that will be a decent overclock to 3.9GHz on air cooling with 4 sticks :)

BTW, what are good stable/torture tests? I ran two instances of Prime95 for a while without problems, though Super Pi was giving me errors ("convergence" as I recall)?
 
Haven't tested it long enough to know if I'm stable at 3.9GHz - I did run dual Prime95's but for maybe an hour, no problems there - CPU temp hit 61*C (VCore was at Auto).

I think I might settle for 15x 240GHz for a 3.6GHz OC, I doubt there will be any stability issues at that level.
 
I use PAtriots its 4-3-3-12 but mine clocks over 800MHZ and no problem. (also using 4x512mb) Its the performance Extreme brand DDR2 700MHZ.
 
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