Is Cas2 RAM that important? and other ?'s

[nitrousninja]

Building a T-bird system and want the right RAM. Everyone seems to push Mushkin. I have the Asus K7V mobo and it will handle 133 and vc133. What is the difference? Also, would there be a noticable gain in gaming performance between 128 and 256MB of RAM? Is cas2/cas3 a speed thing? If you know a sight that explains this just post the link and I'll get reading. Thanks in advance!

 

[Goi]

Mushkin is good because they're respectable, and their speciality is memory. PC133 means the SDRAM runs at 133MHz, VC stands for Virtual-Channel, and its an optimization of normal SDRAM which makes it perform better, but its support and supply is very limited, not to mention its price is high, so don't worry about that, just get normal PC133 SDRAM.

Simply put, CAS measures the memory access latency, i.e. the time it takes(in memory clock cycles) to access memory, so the lower the better. However, performance benefits are usually negligible.

As you'v probably guessed, usually the more memory you have the better. Right now the standard is still 128MB I believe, but if you've got the budget, no harm getting 256MB and making use of it. There'll be a gain in gaming performance, but its really subjective whether its noticable.

 

[Mem]

nitrousninja, go here for info on memory,CAS2/3 etc,

http://www.bxboards.com/pc133/

 

[Ulysses]

See:
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.html?i=1213
and
[L]http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/assessor/index.htm[/L.

AnandTech says VC RAM offers no performance benefit over SDRAM, if I recall.

CAS 2 settings in the BIOS will show a performance gain in synthetic benchmarks, but if you overclock aggressively you may have to revert to CAS 3 for stability at higher MHz.

 

[Quickfingerz]

CAS 2 as far as memory bandwith goes does provide a significant increase.

 

[Eug]

I get higher frames/sec in Quake 3 at 110 MHz Cas 2 than I do at 112 MHz Cas 3. Mind you, it runs fine at 112 MHz Cas 2, but my memory automatically sets itself at Cas 3 at 112 MHz. (Initially before I manually set the Cas timings I was wondering why upping the FSB lowered my Quake 3 benchmarks.)

 

[JJHendrix]

you won't notice a huge jump in FPS, but games themselves and levels will load a lot faster.

 

[SufferinSuccotash]

Can't remember where I read, but I got the link from these forums. Someone did a benchmark on a system and discovered that a system running at 112 MHz FSB outperformed with CAS2 outperformed a 133 FSB with CAS3 (not by much, but it did beat it out). I think they were only measuring the bandwidth of the memory access channel, though, so I'm not sure if this applies.

 

[peemo]

If you compare 2-2-2 to 3-3-3 you will likely see a real difference, at least in benchmarking. I don't know whether you will notice it in actually playing games.

http://www.tweakmax.com/html/cas/cas-1.cfm

http://www.tweakmax.com/html/cas/cas-4.cfm

 

[RC]

http://www.aceshardware.com/board/general/read.php?message_id=16051

and

http://www5.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/reviews/cpu/thunderbird_1ghz/13.shtml using VC SDRAM