A Stupid Move or Not?

[cheapherk]

Here's a question I posted on Corsair's: House of Help forum for The RAM Guy. I don't know how long it will take to get a response, so I thought I'd give my favorite community a try.

I presently have 2X512 Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM. I want to graduate to 2GB, but my motherboard only has two dimm slots.

The only way I could afford to do this is to buy 2x1024 Corsair Value Select.

I am a gamer, but not an overclocker and hoped because I'm not worried about overclocking my RAM, I would benefit from this added RAM. I don't need to worry about dual-channel because my motherboard doesn't support this feature.

Please advise for I need to make my purchase in a within 3 hours.

My specs:

Athlon 64 3400+
EVGA nForce 3 250Gb (115-K8-NF31-AX) motherboard
EVGA Geforce 6800GT
Windows XP Pro
Maxtor 120 Gig SATA 8MB Cache HDD
SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Platinum

Another user replied with this:

Hi,

Is your XMS 2 x 512 mb run at 400 mhz in your PC?
As far as I know 2 x 1024 mb wouldn't run at 400 mhz in Athlon64 (754) due to cpu limitation, You can check for sure in AMD/ask Ram Guy.

I ran Everest home and got this:

Motherboard Chipset nVIDIA nForce3 250, AMD Hammer

Memory Timings 2.5-4-4-9 (CL-RCD-RP-RAS)



What do you think?
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[gorcorps]

If your mobo supports it, I'd say try to get 1 gig of faster ram instead of adding more of the same stuff. Games don't take advantage of more than a gig of ram, so for games it isnt worth it. Other programs and your OS uses more ram, so for other things it would help. If you went out and got another gig of fast as sh!t ram, your games would see a moderate performance increase.

 

[Fern]

In benching and gameplay I haven't been able to notice a diff whether my ram's timings are loose or tight (lower latencies).

So, faster (lower latency) expensive ram doesn't make a diff in gaming from what I can tell.

Fern

 

[BadThad]

If you're just a gamer, I wouldn't bother going to 2GB of ram, you're not going to see a difference from 1GB.

 

[cheapherk]

Thanks. I just bought a 1 Gig stick. I'll add more later if I feel the need.