Mixing Ram Speeds?

[Scottie2004]

Hi,

I currently have a 512 stick of DDR 333 in my pc. I'm planning a full upgrade in the next week or so and wondered whether including this stick the the 2x512 DDR 400 would increase / decrease my gaming performance. Basically, am i better with the extra ram or the extra speed?

Thanks.

 

[HangTime]

All your RAM must run at the same speed, so it depends what kind of speed you can get out of the PC2700. If you are lucky it might overclock quite well allowing you to run all three at or close to DDR400.

It's a tough call, in some modern games like FEAR, BF2, WoW etc there is a benefit from >1gig RAM, so in those cases it would be worth running all three sticks.

Of course this is all dependent on what motherboard chipset you have, since you might not be able to run at DDR400 regardless of what memory sticks you have in.