Need help deciding on memory for new Athlon 64

[Ages120]

Well this is going to be my new gaming system for a while to come. Have everything pinned down except ram at this point.

Power Supply Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480W with Black housing - Purepower Butterfly

CPU AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 1MB L2 Cache

MotherBoard EPOX 8KDA3+ nVidia nForce3-250Gb Waiting till it comes out

Video Card X800XT Waiting for it to come out to

Hard Drive WD Raptor SATA 74 gig

I wanna get ram above PC 3500 which is a top performer and overclocks well that also works well with Athlon 64s

 

[imported_oralpain]

Im giving Kingmax PC4000 hardcore a try, it's cheap hand has gotten good reviews. I'll post bakc when I find out for sure how well it does.

 

[daos]

Originally posted by: oralpain
Im giving Kingmax PC4000 hardcore a try, it's cheap hand has gotten good reviews. I'll post bakc when I find out for sure how well it does.

man, thats the last kind of memory you want to use on an AMD system. those high bandwidth memories have horrible timings and on an AMD, you want the absolute best timings possible. i suggest either OCZ PC3200, or some good quality Corsair PC3200. if your looking to overclock, then upgrade to the PC3500 line.

 

[charloscarlies]

man, thats the last kind of memory you want to use on an AMD system. those high bandwidth memories have horrible timings and on an AMD, you want the absolute best timings possible. i suggest either OCZ PC3200, or some good quality Corsair PC3200. if your looking to overclock, then upgrade to the PC3500 line.

 

[imported_oralpain]

Originally posted by: daos

Originally posted by: oralpain
Im giving Kingmax PC4000 hardcore a try, it's cheap hand has gotten good reviews. I'll post bakc when I find out for sure how well it does.

man, thats the last kind of memory you want to use on an AMD system. those high bandwidth memories have horrible timings and on an AMD, you want the absolute best timings possible. i suggest either OCZ PC3200, or some good quality Corsair PC3200. if your looking to overclock, then upgrade to the PC3500 line.

This memory is capapble of reasonable timings at its rated speed. I'm quite confident that it will turn out to be faster than my mushkin pc3200 BH-5 2-2-2 , with the relitivly low voltages my board can put out.

The timings that I have seen to have the most impact on A64s are tRCD and tRP, in my testing CAS has made virtually 0 difference. 3-4-4-x are horrible timings for A64s, 3-3-3-x are significantly better. I should beable to run 3-3-2, 2.5-3-2, or if im lucky 3-2-2.

 

[Cerb]

Originally posted by: charloscarlies

man, thats the last kind of memory you want to use on an AMD system. those high bandwidth memories have horrible timings and on an AMD, you want the absolute best timings possible. i suggest either OCZ PC3200, or some good quality Corsair PC3200. if your looking to overclock, then upgrade to the PC3500 line.

PC3200 and PC3500 can be found with good timings. Above that, you can lower the speed and tighten the timings, but why when you can just buy PC3500? The only times that the faster, higher-latency (we're talking CL/CAS 2 or 2.5 vs. 4 and sometimes even 5 for the cheap stuff!) are heavy SIMD work, and even then it's not enough to be worth it.
CL 4, which many PC4000 sticks us, unless I'm mistaken, is 40 CPU clock cycles for you, just to do the lookup, and timings get worse, typically (like 4-8-8-8, where most CL 2 sticks are going to be 2-3-3-7 and most 2.5 sticks 2.5-4-4-8).
CL 2 PC3200 ~= CL 4 PC4000.
Edit: Huh, So I was mistaken. Found one of the articles I was looking for, and they were specifically OCing modules getting them up there. Well whack me on the head with a random Acme product.

I can't find one of the good reviews off-hand where they showed how those loosening timings really sucked. I'm pretty sure it was either here, toms, or both, though.

 

[imported_oralpain]

There is no 184pin DDR with CL higher than 3. After I get my new system up and running i'd be willing to show that 3-3-3 at 250 mhz is definatly faster than 2-2-2 at 200.

I do my own reviewing/testing. Very few places have caught on to the fact that CAS doesnt mean much for A64s, the other numbers matter alot more. Places rarely test 3-2-2-7 timings for example. Useually 2-2-2-5/6, 2.5-3-3-6/7 and 3-4-4-8 or close to those are all that is shown. If they test on A64s at all that is.

 

[Ages120]

Back to my subject would the new EB OCZ modules be worth looking at?

 

[Ages120]

bump

 

[Runner20]

Hmmmm, I've been looking for RAM for my system as well.

I've got Kingston HyperX and Corsair XMS RAM as top 2, Crucial is still a possibility.

I would suggest Corsair XMS 3200 2 sticks of 512MB.

However, if you can find Kingston RAM cheaper, then get that. Either way, both are high quality.

If your going to overclock, then get 3500 or higher speed RAM.

 

[imported_oralpain]

Whats with the bump...if some one has something to say they will find it.

Anyway, OCZ EBs are looking pritty good, i haven't tried them myself though. Anandtech has a review on them.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

You state you are buying AMD64 for a gaming rig, in which case timings mean very little.

Tom's timings evaluation


Ace's quick answer to CAS 2 vs CAS 3 for gaming 2% or less difference except Wow! 4% increase in Halo, oh wait that's only 2fps=BFD

P4 dual channel benefits most from tight timings over bandwidth, a whopping 2-3% :roll:

Considering I can get 512mb sticks of A-DATA DDR500 for $108 and it's the rare A64 3200+ that will exceed 2.5ghz on air, I'd rather pay less than for higher priced lower frequency ram with tighter timings and be guaranteed the ram runs that frequency. So you buy more expensive 3500 or 3700 then overclock it, if you don't get great sticks then you will probably not run DDR500 speed with tight timings and if you do then my questions is what price difference did you pay for that whopping couple of percentage points? Some may be able to answer this by bragging they bought ram that was both similarly priced and can run tighter timings at the same speed as the A-DATA=price-to-performance winner like the Barton Mobile :beer: But hey that's not guaranteed, the A-DATA is

 

[EngenZerO]

mushkin 222, its not 3500 but eh...

I will let u know how it performs next week...

 

[Ages120]

Thx Punish for the info. BTW I am just so used to using bumps since I used to post a lot in programming forums and everyone was so busy they didn't check anything but the first page. OCZ Eb series are looking better and better. I will definetly look at the faster DDR chips now though.