Couple 'o questions. 1GB-2GB? u160-320 on PCI?

[amdhunter]

I am in the market for some RAM and was wondering if its really worth going for 2GB of RAM over 1GB? Will I even notice a little bit of difference, or nothing at all in daily use? I can either afford 2GB of conseratively timed value RAM, or 1GB of better timed RAM. Which would be better?

Or should I just get plain ass 1GB RAM. I have a K8T Neo-F 939 board, btw. Since I hear cheap RAM is ok for 939 systems, should I just save money?

Can someone recommend a good Dual channel pair of 1GB under $100? I seen some CAS 2 - G.Skill RAM at newegg, but I read bad things about them somewhere.

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Secondly. I have my hands on some very nice Hitachi u320 SCSI drives. One is 15K/16MB cache and the other is 10K/8MB. They both sync at u160 speeds on my Adaptec 29160 scsi card.

As it is, the 10K drive benches in HD tach @ 110MB/s with just over ~7ms access times, I haven't tested the 15K yet since my motherboard is in RMA. I expect good results from the 16MB cache though. 😉

Question, since the Adaptec card is on a normal 32-bit PCI bus, would I see any benefit at all going by getting a u320 card? Or would it be a waste of money? Anyone uses a u320 card on a regular PCI bus and want to paste a result?

Do the LSI lines of SCSI cards work w/o drivers in XP/XP64 without a floppy disc to install? I love the fact that my Adaptec works with every OS ever, without floppies. Do LSI cards offer that same luxury?

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It's not that I am dumb or anything, I just wonder if its worth it since I wont be upgrading for a long time.

 

[shoRunner]

2gb will do nothing for daily use. i haven't heard anything but good things about the g.skill ram

 

[imported_whatever]

PCI has 32bits*33MHz = 1056Mbits/s = 132MB/s, so even U160 is faster than standard PCI can take.
unless you are doing HEAVY photoshopping or something, 1GB is plenty
edit: U160 works fine in a PCI slot, it is just limited by the bandwidth it has

 

[mechBgon]

I'd stick with the 29160 since it's paid for, and not get too carried away with the HDTach thing. The 32-bit PCI bus is going to bottleneck the peak throughput at 110-120MB/sec, but the low seek times and resistance to bogging under heavy I/O are SCSI's ace cards IMHO.

 

[amdhunter]

Thanks, I guess u320 would be overkill on a daily use computer. Only really heavy disk access I run into is processing large usenet groups. Upwards of 2 million headers at a time sometimes. 🙂

As for the RAM, I am looking up G.Skill and am seeing good things. Maybe it was an isolated incident that one person has been having. I may just place an order at newegg later this week after some more investigation.

Thanks.