Ram Quantity or Frequnecy for Gaming?

[Okiba]

Hi,


My (old) PC currently has 6 GB of RAM (3 memory sticks of 2 GB each) with timing of 5-5-5-18 and frequency of 400Mhz (800Mhz DDR). It's an old PC and therefore the old DDR2 800Mhz sticks.
I'm able to get a free 2 GB stick from work - which will take me to 8 GB. The catch is that this RAM is CL6 (compared to the other three which are CL5). This downgrade the frequency to 333Mhz (666Mhz DDR) but improve timing a bit to 5-5-5-15.
I use this PC for gaming, Whats would have a bigger impacts on performance? Should I add 2 GB and go down in frequency (666Mhz), or leave it as it currently is (6GB) and keep the frequency speed 800Mhz?

The motherboard is P5Q and according to the website has FSB of 1600 / 1333 / 1066 / 800 MHz.
Thanks.

EDIT: Sharing more information. The original two sticks I had years ago are those. I added another 2GB stick that is not identical to the first two a while ago, and this lowered my timing from 5-5-5-15 to 5-5-5-18. But the extra 2 GB was worth it as 4 was to low for today's games. The 4th stick has CL of 6 (where the others has CL 5). This set timing for 5-5-5-15 again, but lowered the frequency from 400Mhz to 366Mhz and I'm trying to decide if the two extra GB worth it.

 

[hojnikb]

Doesn't really matter, the cpu will bottleneck you either way.

 

[Okiba]

Doesn't really matter, the cpu will bottleneck you either way.

Thanks for the quick answer. Why? is it because the CPU FSB is 1066Mhz? What is so the limit of the frequency? 1066/2?
I edited the original post with more information.

 

[cyclohexane]

Doesn't matter. Your pc is too old to game on anyway.

 

[Okiba]

Doesn't matter. Your pc is too old to game on anyway.

Well, I got it 6 years ago and I aimed on a good setup. The video card I got was the bang those days

So right, I'm not able to run the latest Battlefield with Max settings, but since I mostly play on consoles, this setup is good enough to play exclusive PC games (for example, it seems to handle Overwatch pretty fine on low settings).

Going back to the question, I'm trying to squish as much as possible for this one if possible.

 

[hojnikb]

Going from 800MT to 667MT won't hurt overall performance much, because you'll be limited by your cpu either way.

Beside, you can stick the memory in and see it for yourself.

 

[MongGrel]

A Q6600 was even getting long in the tooth 6 years ago, I used to run one at 4 Ghz before that.

Trying to fix it with ram at this point is like beating a dead horse for modern gaming, though I would think 8 these days minimum is better than 6.

 

[Soulkeeper]

for an old pc i'd go quantity over quality
specially if it has an old hard drive, you'll want to avoid any swapping

 

[Okiba]

I was able to 'force' the machine to run on 400Mhz (800 DDR) by forcing 800Mhz in the Bios (it was set to automatically).

All cards are actually 800Mhz cards, so I have no idea why adding the last one downgraded speed to 667Mhz.

So technically, because all cards are 400Mhz, I'm guess there is no damage with changing the Bios settings? (as it does not overclock?)

 

[wilds]

What games are you trying to play exactly? You have enough RAM for that old platform, but you may have to make some serious compromises for a newer game because of your ancient platform.

 

[Okiba]

What games are you trying to play exactly? You have enough RAM for that old platform, but you may have to make some serious compromises for a newer game because of your ancient platform.

Mainly trying to play some guys that choke out in FPS once in a while because memory start swapping. I'm going to do some testing to make sure I'm fine now using 3Dmark.

Thanks everyone!