Big difference between CL2 & CL3 ram??

[jamautosound]

A friend of mine has one stick of 512 CL2 ram, and two sticks of 128 CL3 ram, all Kingston. He wants to put all of the memory in. I say keep just the 512 because I heard that the faster ram would be forced to run at the slower ram's rated speed.

Question's:
True or not? re: The faster ram reduced to slower speed.
Would more ram, 768 @ CL3, be faster than 512 @ CL2?

. . . and depending on the answer, where do I find info re: the 512 megs or more issues with WinME?


Thanks in advance.

 

[dszd0g]

Originally posted by: jamautosound
A friend of mine has one stick of 512 CL2 ram, and two sticks of 128 CL3 ram, all Kingston. He wants to put all of the memory in. I say keep just the 512 because I heard that the faster ram would be forced to run at the slower ram's rated speed.

Question's:
True or not? re: The faster ram reduced to slower speed.
Would more ram, 768 @ CL3, be faster than 512 @ CL2?

It depends on whether your friend actually regularly uses more than 512MB of memory or not. If he runs programs that put him over 512MB of memory then adding slower memory is still going to be faster than swapping to disk. If all he does is browse online, play games, and run OpenOffice then the 512MB is going to be faster.

Adding the CAS3 DIMMs will drop all memory to CAS3. On some motherboard/DIMM combinations, even adding CAS2 memory will increase the latency because of the additional latency with using multiple DIMM slots (This is more common on the higher end of things).

As to what the performance difference is: On my system the difference between CAS 2-2-2-6 and CAS2.5-3-3-7 is 1.32% in Sandra Memory benchmark (actual program performance will be less than that). The difference between CAS2-2-2-6 and CAS3-3-3-8 is going to be more than that. I generally here 3% difference in memory performance quoted between CAS2 and CAS3, but that may be a little high.

. . . and depending on the answer, where do I find info re: the 512 megs or more issues with WinME?

Did you try checking the first place to look for Microsoft issues?

"Out of Memory" Error Messages with Large Amounts of RAM Installed

 

[alkemyst]

the above is right....768 of CL3 will be faster if more than the 512 of CL2 is normally used, but the difference in pure CL2 to CL3 is only about 2% on most tests.

The main reason CL2 is better is for overclocking, you have a lot better chance at hitting usable FSB's (ie a CL2 stick of PC133 may go CL3 at 150, but a CL3 stick of PC133 may go out of spec at 143)

with regards to ME, anything on the old 95/98 platform seems to not accept more than 512MB properly. Some people have no problems, some have a general slowdown in all tasks, and some constant BSOD's and other screw ups.

I recommend no less than 2k now a days. Almost everything worthwhile has a patch to run on it

 

[jamautosound]

Thank you guys very much, dszd0g and alkemyst for the info. I'll pass this on to my friend, especially the part about getting more of an overclock. He has a 900 T-bird running at 1000 right now, so maybe I can squeeze a little more out of that.