Memory Advice Time

msdl28712 · 25 Jul 2006 at 14:35

Ok with expected arrival of processor gonna need a couple of gig of memory

My system is as follows

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ (Socket 939)
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro
K8N-Neo4f
Asus Extreme N6600 Silencer 256MB
Casecom KG-868 ATX Full Tower Case

Not to sure what mem to go for was hoping to pay £120 all in

Wanting to do some overclocking on this rig so what would you recommend.

Cheers again
Marc

Dutch Guy · 25 Jul 2006 at 15:11

G.Skill 2GB DDR HZ PC4000 (2x1GB) CAS3 Dual Channel Kit or OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC3200 Dual Channel Platinum Series EL-DDR CAS2

Also remember that you can always run the memory on a divider with a minimal performance hit so you are never limited by the memory in your CPU overclocking.

Minstadave · 25 Jul 2006 at 17:34

Dutch Guy said:
G.Skill 2GB DDR HZ PC4000 (2x1GB) CAS3 Dual Channel Kit or OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC3200 Dual Channel Platinum Series EL-DDR CAS2

Also remember that you can always run the memory on a divider with a minimal performance hit so you are never limited by the memory in your CPU overclocking.

If you're running on a divider the GSkill PC3200 ZX is easier to work with than the PC4000 HZ, just keep it at 200Mhz ish with 2-3-2-6 timings and you're well away.

msdl28712 · 25 Jul 2006 at 17:50

Any chance on a little more info on what a divider is will also read but youll probably pin it down a bit more in a few sentences than reading a few pages of info

Cheers guys

Marc

Minstadave · 25 Jul 2006 at 17:59

msdl28712 said:
Any chance on a little more info on what a divider is will also read but youll probably pin it down a bit more in a few sentences than reading a few pages of info

Cheers guys

Marc

A divider is a way of running the memory bus slower than the CPU bus.

So if you overclocked your CPU by upping the HTT bus from 200 to 250, without a divider your memory will be running at 250mhz. Using a divider such you can run the memory at a fraction of the HTT speed, so using the 5/6 (aka the 166Mhz) divider you will run your memory at 250 x (5/6) = 207.5Mhz, which PC3200 would be stable at.

On Athlon 32bit platforms running a divider would kill performance, they preferred 1:1 (no divider). But the A64 architecture has very little penalty running with a divider, performance on A64 is simply about CPU speed.