Which way would you go?

k. been doin alot of reading and came to a delima

i have 200cdn to spend,

option 1: 2x 1gig cas 3 mushkin green pc3200

option 2: 2x 512mb 2252 ozc gold pc3200 dual kit

i seen there is quite a difference between t1 and t2 on my a64 platform. faster with less ram? or more with high timings. i play mostly car games, but i do like some of the newer fps(fear, quake4, bf2). and my classic c&c generals. what would be better in the long run?

wow, thats a bind, check out the classifieds section and see what you can find for sale.

2x1GB will only help when you actually use more than 1GB of RAM, but it will run circles around the fastest pair of 512MB sticks you can buy if the system starts dipping into the page file. The hard drive is extremely slow compared to any RAM.

Both configurations you mentioned above should run at 1T, but it's been well documented that going to 2T only hurts real world performance about 3%. Forget the memory bandwidth scores, check your framerates and you'll see they hardly change.

Also, fast RAM doesn't give you that big a performance boost with an A64 anyway. The onboard memory controller works so well that the memory is almost never a bottleneck. Hence high performance RAM will get you only a few FPS in your games.

Both configurations you mentioned above should run at 1T, but it's been well documented that going to 2T only hurts real world performance about 3%. Forget the memory bandwidth scores, check your framerates and you'll see they hardly change.

Also, fast RAM doesn't give you that big a performance boost with an A64 anyway. The onboard memory controller works so well that the memory is almost never a bottleneck. Hence high performance RAM will get you only a few FPS in your games.

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That's exactly right. I would go with the 2x1gb, even if it's a little slower.

Yep, recently upgraded to 2x1024. Though the 2x512 will give you better timings, nothing beats never needing to use a pagefile.

thanks for the quality feedback guys... ill definitely get the 2 gig instead. i might not like overclocking anymore. but I'm sure i can get that 3-3-7-3 t2 timing to 2.5-3-6-3 t1 with a little voltage

(nice! spell check!)

Good luck, Magnus.

Where did the t2 command rate come from? Oh... is this for your Intel system? If so, scratch everything I said except the part about the pagefile being slower than the slowest ram wearing clown shoes and pulling a dead elephant. I don't know squit about P4 systems. The last Intel CPU I owned was a 486.