different rams, noticable?

[azntiger0586]

i was wondering. When i bought my cpu, i had a limited amount of money so i bought a 512 ddr pc2100. So far, I have had no problem. but what i really want to know is that if i bought a high one like pc3200 or higher.. what would i notice? if i do notice anything, would I notice anything as much? would it be more responsive? and is it possible to mix these rams, such as 2100 and 3200.

 

[infinite012]

You won't notice a difference unless you can get it to run in dual channel, but even then you're not guaranteed 100% compatibility with the other RAM. You can run PC2100 and PC3200 in the same system, but you will only be able to run it at PC2100 speeds (unless it overclocks miraculously to PC3200 speeds...).

 

[Jeff7181]

You need to give more information. You don't even say whether it's an AMD or Intel processor. Give some system details and then people can tell you what the differences will be.

 

[azntiger0586]

P4 1.8ghz 256k
512 ddr pc2100 ram
128mb radeon 9800np (flashed to pro)
40 gig hd Maxtor 7200 rpm.
P4X400 Soyo Dragon Plat.

 

[Jeff7181]

You'll see a difference in games and benchmarks. Anything that's CPU and memory intensive. Those early P4's were starved for memory bandwidth... even with PC3200 RAM they're starved for bandwidth, but not as much as with your PC2100. If you can afford it, go ahead and get it... but keep in mind that processor is a out dated... although it probably can overclock pretty well, it's still old technology... it's been replaced by the northwood core that has twice the L2 cache and a faster bus.
So what I'm trying to say is... don't dump a whole lotta money into that cause you still may not be happy with it after all is said and done.

 

[azntiger0586]

let say i get a P4 2.4b 512k 533 fsb. would the ram make more of a difference? and what exactly is hyper thread, is it like quantispeed for amd?

 

[Jeff7181]

Yes, the faster RAM would still make a difference... probably more so than with the one you have.

To put it simply, Hyper-Threading makes use of parts of the CPU that aren't being used with a non-HT processor. Windows see's a single Hyper-Threading processor as two processors. And that's how it treats it... it allows two threads to be run simultaneously. If a program isn't designed to be "multi-threaded," meaning, run on a dual CPU computer, it won't benefit from Hyper-Threading by itself. However, if you have an Operating system like Windows XP that's capable of multi-threading, you may run two applications at once and not see much of a slow down at all. For example... you could be encoding a divx movie and playing Unreal Tournament 2003 and neither would slow down very much.