cpu:RAM dividers and performance issues

through my vast browsing on the forums in the time i've been here, i've read that dividers are ok on the A64 and Intel platforms, but have performance issues on other AMD chips/boards. as you can see in my sig, i don't have an intel rig, and haven't made the upgrade to an a64 so far. i'm planning on oc'ing after i get some new RAM, so i'm learning as much as i can before i get started on it to heavy. i've done some searching recently, but haven't been able to find exactly what the performance issues are with using dividers. i'm looking for what type of issues there are [mem bandwidth, speed, general instability, etc.] and how serious they are [2%, 10%, 50%??].
from what i've read, my xp 3200+ probably won't oc past what some decent RAM can do stably. on the other hand, i wont rma working RAM just because it wont oc as much as i'd like, or thought it would. i personally think that would be wrong.
anyway, enough rambling from me. on to some answers

Last I heard there was a pretty big perfromance hit when using a divider on an Athlon XP system, not sure the percentage though. I could be wrong so please correct me if I am.

I agree with inkfx's statement. You'd want to run them in sync. The performance hit? Dunno, percentage-wise.

you know, i actually think i experienced the performance hit last nite. i was doing a little more memtest-ing on my crap RAM [just to be sure ] and thought i could get away with running it below spec. ultimately it didn't work, but i noticed a few times where the computer just kind of completely paused in windows for a few seconds [depending on what i was trying to do]. i'd say that's a pretty big hit