RAM advice please!

[indyjones]

he all i am sellign my 2 x 256 OCZ EL DDR PC-3500 Dual Channel rams (as advertised in the trading post) for £85 so I can buy a gig of ram.
What ram does people recommend I want a matched pair of 512meg sticks so I can run them on my Asus nforce 2 board in dual channel mode.
The ram that looks good is the GeIL 1GB (2x512MB) PC3200 Ultra Series CAS2
as its about £50 chaper than other makes and has good reviews here is a link clicky
Cheers 🙂

 

[ming]

For gaming, I wouldn't know. But they say brands like Geil, Kingston, OCZ and some oda one.
What I want to know is - would an average user noticed 'major' performance boost whether they use one of the above or one made by Crucial?

 

[indyjones]

good point but i have heard its makes sense to get a mathed pair and go for dual channel mode

 

[ming]

Matched pair for dual channel makes sense. But I still don't understand why people spend possibly 100-400% more on the 'top-of-the-range' RAM if there isn't a major performance boost over Crucial's brand.

 

[dreamliner77]

AFAIK, dual channel on the nforce boards does not really give you any performance boost

 

[Xie]

well better quality ram will run @ lower CAS settings making it faster and should also be higher quality leading to less data errors and also less dead ram in general. 🙂

-edit- also for those that OC higher quality of ram is a must for heat and error correction @ overclocked speeds.

 

[LeeJend]

The price difference is usually due to faster latency ratings. Cheap DDR 400 is CAS 3.0 which sucks. Most is CAS 2.5 I can't remember seeing any CAS 2.0

The other advantage is that the better brand RAM can usually run higher clock speed, sometimes even without relaxing the CAS rating. But as always, it's a matter of luck if you get anything that can be overclcocked.

I bought a pair of some 333mhz 2.5 CL spektek RAM ($24 each after rebates) for my nforce2 board and am running them at 376 mhz along with a third stick of Kingston 333 2.5 RAM. They are operating in dual ddr mode but produce almost no speed advantage over single ddr. Adding or removing the third stick makes no speed change. The FSB on the AMD chips seems to be the choke point which is why I pushed my FSB from 333 to 376.

 

[Sazar]

I recommend corsair XMS 😀

I love mine...

 

[dreamliner77]

I recommend what has the best rebate at Best Buy...hahaha

 

[indyjones]

hmm ok my current ram is CAS 2.0 and the ram i am looking at is CAS2.0