Will 2700 RAM hurt performance with Athlon 64 3200+?

[Titan13]

I am considering upgrading to the Athlon 64 3200+ on the MSI K8T Neo board. I currently have a P4 2.6 system with 1GB of 2700 RAM. I want to re-use my current 2700 (333) RAM (2 sticks 512) in the new Athlon system. How much performance will I loose versus buying new 3200 RAM? I'm getting an X800 XT video card to go with the system. Thanks.

 

[justin1466]

you won't be able to take full advantage of you cpus power (since PC2700 is designed for a 333 mhz bus)
and your vid card will also have a performance hit.

I'd recomend 512 mb of PC3200 over 1 GB of PC2700 anyday

 

[LED]

What type of chips are on the current RAM you have as some quality high performance 2700 ill out clock generic 3200. (ie BH5, BH6, Samsung, Hynix)

 

[Budman]

Originally posted by: justin1466
you won't be able to take full advantage of you cpus power (since PC2700 is designed for a 333 mhz bus)
and your vid card will also have a performance hit.

I'd recomend 512 mb of PC3200 over 1 GB of PC2700 anyday

That's funny if I were to chose I over 512 vs 1gig I would chose the 1 gig slower ram.

When you do get over 512 megs usage it dont matter how fast your ram is, 512 megs + swapfile is always slower than 1 gig + no swapping to disk.

 

[Dman877]

Memeory speed isn't AS important for the A64 as it is for other cpu's, you can use pc2700 but I would plan on upgrading in the future if I were you.

 

[Titan13]

Thanks for the replys. Anyone know an an article that benchmarks different speed memory with an Athlon 64 processor? trying to find some good numbers for gaming to determine if I can wait with little impact or really need to spend the money to keep from bottlenecking the 3200+ and x800 XT.

 

[JBT]

I would just get the speed of the RAM up as high as I could if I already had a gig and deal with it. I'm sure it won't hurt to much but most RAM can get atleast close to 400 DDR.

 

[Arcanedeath]

Actualy PC2700 ram doesn't really hurt A64 performance that much. the Emachines M6805 laptop uses PC2700 sodimms and performs very much like a desktop A64 system so I'd go for the Gig of PC2700 over 512mb of PC3200 unless you could upgrade to 1 Gig of PC3200 in the near future. Just my 2 cents...

 

[Titan13]

Now I'm a little confused, but I do like the last bit of news. Why does 2700 RAM not impact performance on the A64 (versus 3200) as much as other CPU's? Any idea if it would be a loss of 5-10%? I may stick with my current 1GB of 2700 for a while and upgrade to 3200 later, if necessary. Thanks again for the help.

 

[cptCuervo]

I'm in the same boat Titan13. I have 1Gig of perfectly good PC2700 DDR and am upgrading to an AMD64 3200+. I decided to keep the Ram for now and upgrade later. With current Ram prices I'd be looking at almost $200 for new memory... I know that there would be a performance gain with new memory, but how much? and would I notice it yet?

The PC3200 and 3500 DDR should drop in price in the next 6 months to a year (one would hope).

 

[Muadib]

I'm in the same boat too. I just upgraded to a AMD64 3200+, and I used my old ram. I'm still playing with it, but so far I can't get a stable overclock. I just don't get the HT settings, but I will.

 

[MemberSince97]

Originally posted by: Titan13
Now I'm a little confused, but I do like the last bit of news. Why does 2700 RAM not impact performance on the A64 (versus 3200) as much as other CPU's? Any idea if it would be a loss of 5-10%? I may stick with my current 1GB of 2700 for a while and upgrade to 3200 later, if necessary. Thanks again for the help.

Because, the memory controller is on die.

 

[IPLaw]

I'd be glad to underclock the ram to PC 2700 on my AOpen AK86-L 3000+ system for you. I currently have sandra, UT2004, and Q3 to benchmark with. Incidentally, when I first built my system, my ram was improperly dectected as PC 2700, and even then the system was more responsive than my prior AXP 3000+ system running 2700. Furthermore, as you can seen in the 939 reviews, additional bandwidth doesnt really help the A64 all that much - so by extension decresing the bandwidth from 3.2 to 2.7 Gbs wont be too painful.

 

[Bonesdad]

I'd do the 512 of 3200...don't waste on slower RAM....where do you go from there? Gotta buy a whole new GB of PC3200. At least with 512 MB you are half way there....

 

[IPLaw]

The results for UT2004 on a Radeon 9600 are:

UPDATED with DDR 266 Scores

1024x768
DDR 400 = 1024x768 93.98 fps botmatch (dm-rankin: 101.42 fps, as-convoy: 76.69 fps, br-colossus: 103.84 fps )
DDR 333 = 1024x768 93.85 fps botmatch (dm-rankin: 101.42 fps, as-convoy: 76.26 fps, br-colossus: 103.86 fps )
DDR 266 = 1024x768 81.18 fps botmatch (dm-rankin: 89.61 fps, as-convoy: 60.50 fps, br-colossus: 93.44 fps )

800x600
DDR 400 = 800x600 131.36 fps botmatch (dm-rankin: 153.62 fps, as-convoy: 86.82 fps, br-colossus: 153.64 fps )
DDR 333 = 800x600 130.09 fps botmatch (dm-rankin: 153.59 fps, as-convoy: 83.81 fps, br-colossus: 152.88 fps )
DDR 266 = 800x600 93.97 fps botmatch (dm-rankin: 72.86 fps, as-convoy: 74.18 fps, br-colossus: 134.87 fps )

Conclusion - Any relatively new game is going to stress your video card, and not your system bandwidth. Interestingly enough, even at 800x600, the lowest resolution ppl play at these days, UT2004 performance did not increase at all. While this result has no bearing on crunching/vid editing/etc, it's applicable to games generally.

UPDATE - UT2004 did take a serious hit going from PC2700 to PC2100. As expected, at the higher resolution, the difference was much smaller.

 

[Titan13]

Thank you, IPLaw! Your test told me what I wanted. Since I already own the 1GB of 333 RAM, I'll stick with it.

 

[Bar81]

Originally posted by: IPLaw
The results for UT2004 on a Radeon 9600 are

1024x768
DDR 400 = 1024x768 93.98 fps botmatch (dm-rankin: 101.42 fps, as-convoy: 76.69 fps, br-colossus: 103.84 fps )
DDR 333 = 1024x768 93.85 fps botmatch (dm-rankin: 101.42 fps, as-convoy: 76.26 fps, br-colossus: 103.86 fps )

800x600
DDR 400 = 800x600 131.36 fps botmatch (dm-rankin: 153.62 fps, as-convoy: 86.82 fps, br-colossus: 153.64 fps )
DDR 333 = 800x600 130.09 fps botmatch (dm-rankin: 153.59 fps, as-convoy: 83.81 fps, br-colossus: 152.88 fps )

Conclusion - Any relatively new game is going to stress your video card, and not your system bandwidth. Interestingly enough, even at 800x600, the lowest resolution ppl play at these days, UT2004 performance did not increase at all. While this result has no bearing on crunching/vid editing/etc, it's applicable to games generally.

Sweet Jehova, that's a 9600!!!! You're definitely gonna be vidcard limited with that. Even a 2+ year old 9700 pro drops an asskicking on the 9600. To answer the question, yes it will hurt performance with a good vid card but we're only talking a few percent so it's not gonna cripple your system like it would on a P4.

 

[IPLaw]

Bar81: Since you have an A64 and a Radeon 9800, can you please underclock you ram and run a few UT2004 benches for us? The issue of A64 performance with PC2700 is an often ask but seldom answered question. It would be great if you could provide us with some benches with a strong video card.

 

[Lyfer]

Will the Athlon 64 work with PC2100 RAM too?

 

[*kjm]

Originally posted by: Lyfer
Will the Athlon 64 work with PC2100 RAM too?

Good question.

 

[Bar81]

Originally posted by: IPLaw
Bar81: Since you have an A64 and a Radeon 9800, can you please underclock you ram and run a few UT2004 benches for us? The issue of A64 performance with PC2700 is an often ask but seldom answered question. It would be great if you could provide us with some benches with a strong video card.

Does the demo allow benchmarking? If so, how?

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: justin1466
you won't be able to take full advantage of you cpus power (since PC2700 is designed for a 333 mhz bus)
and your vid card will also have a performance hit.

I'd recomend 512 mb of PC3200 over 1 GB of PC2700 anyday

Then you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
1Gb PC2700 will easily give better results when that 512Mb PC3200 starts running low.

 

[IPLaw]

Yes, you can run the benchmark with just the UT2004 demo. There are 3rd party utilities to make the process easier. Here is one I ran across . However, benchmarks from any modern game would be helpful. Hopefully more A64 owners will chime in so we can put this issue to rest!

 

[Bar81]

Memory at 191.7:
-----------
dm-rankin
52.817421 / 109.451149 / 246.442276 fps
Score = 109.594337

as-convoy
22.559698 / 69.522148 / 120.839699 fps
Score = 69.615997

ons-torlan
14.043187 / 103.893761 / 175.966995 fps
Score = 104.037567

br-colossus
29.110909 / 131.368835 / 295.270142 fps
Score = 131.471161

ctf-bridgeoffate
42.568398 / 148.992966 / 327.693604 fps
Score = 149.243622
--------------------




Memory at 153.4mhz:
---------------------
dm-rankin
50.683475 / 106.069008 / 236.145584 fps
Score = 106.217834

as-convoy
22.402607 / 67.601448 / 118.193810 fps
Score = 67.689262

ons-torlan
13.047721 / 101.018997 / 159.908142 fps
Score = 101.158974

br-colossus
28.936880 / 126.756721 / 278.875397 fps
Score = 126.866447

ctf-bridgeoffate
39.918705 / 143.026062 / 309.506836 fps
Score = 143.275330
----------------

 

[IPLaw]

Thanks for the info Bar81! Apparently, using PC2700 has a negligible impact on performance in UT2004 for those with fast vid cards. On a different note, your board is seriously underclocking your FSB - have you looked into it more? The difference between 153 (306) and 166 (333) is nothing to sneeze about.