2x512 or 2x1 Gig ram

[terraphile]

I have an Athlon 64 3200+, socket 939 with Av8 Mobo. I currently have 2 sticks of 512 pc3200 in it. I have been thinking about upgrading and adding 2 more 512 sticks, but have heard this might reduce speed. Is this true? Would Simply getting and using only 2x1 Gig sticks be at least as fast as 2x512 for gaming, because I heard that higher mem amount has higher latency. I need 2 gigs to run VMWare.

Lastly, anyone know what the best gig sticks are for the price, no Overclocking? thanks.

 

[Rock Hydra]

I believe I seen somehwere that in the case of having 4 sticks of memory, you won't get the nice CAS 2 timings as they cause instability. Although, I don't think this should be a cause for a whole lot of concern, but I read in PC World magazine that CAS 3 latency doesn't offer that much of a performance penalty over CAS 2. And since you're not overclocking, maybe you needn't worry about that. Also, low latency memory is a good deal more expensive, in which it seems like price is your main concern here. Personally, I just seggest buying 2 more sticks of the same type of memory that you currently have, if not buy a respectable branded value memory like Crucial or Corsair.

 

[Tiamat]

generally i think the major minus to gig sticks is that you cant carry as high fsb overclock as if you had smaller sticks of memory. Since you arent overclocking, you will probably not see any difference with mem speed. As for price... they all are expensive... I would buy solely from Mushkin, Corsair, OCZ due to decent to nice customer support.