A little problem with ram

[Confusednewbie1552]

Hi, I just got a 1 GB stick of ram.
I also have 2 512mb sticks of ram in my comp.

Heres the problem: I have one of those old AMD 64's.
In case you don't know, they have a problem using all three sticks of ram at the same time and thus they slow down from ddr400 to ddr333 (I think).

So what should I do? Is the speed hit that damaging compared to the improvement in memory size?

Here are my options:

1GBX512X512: Total of 2 GB but with a speed hit

1GBX512: 1.5 GB not speed hit

512X512: 1 GB no speed hit, the 512 mb are the same model as each other but the 1 gb module is of a different company with different latency and such, i dont believe if it makes that much of a difference in the amd chips (i know it did with the old pentium 4's), but if it does, heres that option.

 

[Confusednewbie1552]

bump

 

[Ketchup]

If you built your own rig you can tell the memory to run 1:1, and it should do that just fine. I have all three slots full, and I am running DDR400 just fine, but I did run into stability problems at 1T. If you have a Dell or something like that, it may automatically drop down to DDR333, but even then it's not a huge deal thanks to the latency of the A64's on-chip memory controller. My advice would be to look at the games you play and see how much memory you are using. Just remember that going down in memory speed = small performance hit, and running out of memory = HUGE performance hit.

 

[Captante]

I just upgraded from 2gb's (2x1gb dimms) to 4gb's (2x2gb dimms) & was still forced to run at 2T for stability ... at first I was concerned about the performance hit this would cause but after benchmarking for a couple days I've measured at most a couple FPS in older games & in newer games like Oblivion, Stalker & FEAR I've seen slight frame-rate increases as well as a significant decrease in level-load times.
Further, in none-gaming applications like ripping a DVD while browsing the web with multiple browser windows the extra RAM has made a very noticable difference ... more then I was expecting in fact & when I move to 64-bit Vista later this year so I can use more then the 3.25gb's seen by XP-Pro & 32-bit Vista Ultimate I'm sure I'll see more of a boost.