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The right memory for me

Dorkenstein

Dorkenstein

Diamond Member
I have an A64 3200+ mobile chip and an Asus K8N-E. I want to get the ram now to hold me over till my full upgrade this winter and I am pretty sure I can keep the same ram because I won't be changing cpu's. I want to get 2x 1 gigabyte sticks. Thanks for any help at all.
 
Obviously you're going to want PC3200. The question will be if you want to spend an extra $110 to get CL 2.

Corsair 1 x 1024MB DDR400 CL3 $83.2 (ChiefValue)
Patriot 1 x 1024MB DDR400 CL 2-3-2-5$138.33 (newegg)

It's a tough call, but I couldn't bring myself to spend over 50% more for the Patriot last time I bought memory. My Corsair CL3 runs at DDR450 at 2.5V, or it runs at CL2.5 just fine with stock voltage if I keep it at DDR400.
 
Is there a major speed difference between CAS 2 and 3? I want it to be fast enough to be able to use for a long time.
 
Originally posted by: Dorkenstein
Is there a major speed difference between CAS 2 and 3? I want it to be fast enough to be able to use for a long time.
Click to expand...

A64 systems aren't affected by latency all that much, certainly not enough to pay 66% more for your memory. That's $110 that could go to something that actually does make a difference.

Overall, the difference between CL2 and CL3 is about 2%. The difference between CL2 and CL2.5 is about 1%.

If you have more than 2 sticks of RAM, it'll drop down to 2T command rate, which does make about a 2.5% overall difference in performance.

I simply can't find a modern test that compares latencies. Most of the benchmarks you'll find are from older systems. The A64 doesn't depend nearly as much on memory speed, though. All the newer tests just seem to be comparing different flavors of uber-expensive RAM and seeing how well they overclock, which just isn't very useful. There's some very useful info in this thread, though:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=28&threadid=1577496&enterthread=y

I really can't see any modern AMD system except maybe a Sempron with 128K cache getting much of a hit from higher latency memory.
 
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