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registered, ecc, parity, non parity, buffered???

E

E3Art

Member
please help me determin what kind of ram is best. Crucial's web site says that for gamers we should get un-registered, non parity, non ecc RAM. But I keep hearing that people are putting Registered, ECC RAM in their performance machines. Which one is best for gamers

right now i have an Athlon XP 1800+ with 256Mb DDR PC2100. (non-parity, non-ecc) Also, do you think that 256Mb is enough? or should i double that?
 
I can't picture a lot of people using registered memory in their game machines. A fairly recent sub-$200 motherboard that accepts registered memory is more rare than one of those $99 Best Buy GF3 cards. 🙂 Registered memory is used on motherboards that have quite a few DIMM slots - for PC133 this would mean more than 4 DIMM slots, for PC2100 DDR it would mean more than 3 slots. It has no other advantage beyond the fact that you can put a lot more DIMMs on a board that you otherwise could.

I'm the guy who's entry on ECC is used in the FAQ and I'm a pretty strong advocate for ECC, but even I don't advise gamers putting it in their machines. ECC is all about data integrity. If your the data on your machine is important enough to you that you are often doing backups, or that this data would really mess your life up if it disappeared, or if your life would be messed up by your machine being unavailable for a day or two, then you need ECC. If it would be a minor irritation, then you don't need ECC. ECC is not much more expensive (usually less than 10%), it barely affects performance (less than a 3% performance penalty in most cases), and if it saves your data just once during the life of your computer, then it more than compensates for itself. But if your data is not that big a deal, then it's a little harder to judge.

As far as 256MB vs. 512MB, only you can tell if 256MB is too little. If you are disk swapping often enough that you notice it, then upgrade to 512MB, if not then save your money.
 
thanks, thats what i was thinking.


i wanted to get 512Mb RAM but the price nearly doubled right before i bought it
 
The other night I had a game backgrounded (Stronghold), and I was downloading some stuff off of the internet, and I was playing some MP3's using WinAmp, and I was editting and printing out digital photographs (from my Canon S110) while I had ZoneAlarm, Norton AV, Outlook Express and ICQ running in the background and I noticed for the first time that you can actually start to run out of 256MB of RAM on Win2k.

Personally, I think 256MB is enough for most people nowadays. 😉
 
Well, I purchased about two weeks ago 512Mb of Crucial PC2100 ECC Registered DRAM (2X256) and don't regret it a bit. I put it into an Abit KG-7 AMD 760 Motherboard and am very happy. It cost me an extra $10 bucks total I believe, but that is well worth it in my opinion.
 
If you want to use more than two SDRAM slots, you will often need registered memory for reliable function. I use ECC whenever possible as you can turn off the ECC checking in the BIOS when you want the last drop of perf and you can turn it back on the rest of the time for best accuracy.
.bh.
 
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