A64 and RAM speeds

[brzrkr0]

I've heard that RAM speeds and timings don't matter as much with an Athlon 64. I'm wondering just how much of a difference it makes. The RAM from my old system is Crucial DDR266 Cas2.5, in one 512mb and one 256mb stick. If I kept this RAM in the new system I'm building, how much of a performance hit do you think I'd get in games, including Doom 3?

The rest of the system:
Athlon 64 3000+ Newcastle
Chaintech VNF3-250
Radeon 9800 pro -> XT 256mb

 

[Arcanedeath]

On the neighborhood of 10% in general system performance eg 2 to 3 processer speed grades. PC2100 just kinda kills A64 performance compared to PC3200 esp. in memory intensive apps. and many games are in this category.

 

[Yanagi]

From what I recall theres virtually no difference between PC 2700 and PC 3200 with an A64. But PC2100 starts to bottleneck it. If I only can remember what thread I read that in. It had benchmarks and the whole package.

 

[Falloutboy]

have you tried overclocking the ram if you could get it too 2700 speeds it could help

 

[brzrkr0]

I'm still waiting for the mb to arrive, so I'll see how far I can OC the RAM when the board gets here. Yanagi, those benchmarks sound pretty useful. Were they in this forum?

 

[brzrkr0]

Also, I wouldn't mind OCing this processor, and everything other than the ram in this system is ready for that: good mb for OCing, good psu, lots of cooling. My guess is this old ram would put a damper on my ability to OC.