Help chosing ram

hacktavist

I am looking into buying a :
Asus P4P800/DELUXE Mainboard S478/800mhz

and a:
Intel Pentium 4 2.6 GHz Boxed PC800

And was wondering what type of ram to buy for it I want about 512 but im not sure about what speed and all that
I dont want to break the bank either.
Any ideas?

unkel

With your rig you need to get PC3200 DDR and if you are in for overclocking, you need higher

Originally posted by hacktavist
I dont want to break the bank either

How much is your budget? You could do worse than sticking in 2*512 TwinMos from Komplett @ €80 in this weeks specials

If your budget is higher there are better options...

hacktavist

That sounds perfect thanks.
Dont suppose you know much about graphics cards?
Ive got 200 to spend on a graphics card any suggestions.
I was looking at the geforce fx range
dont seem too impressive apart from the direct x 9 support.

Doodee

Radeon 9600Pro

netman

get a radeon 9600xt.
geforce fx cards have virtually no dx9 support

on the memory side - twinmos is a good value for money. so is crucial. good quality, decent speed, decent price.

if you're looking for top of the range have a look at corsair xms range, ocz and geil.

if you don't plan on overclocking, you should be looking at pc3200 memory with a cas latency of 2.5. it won't break the budget and will provide decent performance paired with the 800mhz fsb pentium4 processor.

if you want to play with overclocking, look for pc3700 or higher, with cas latency 2.5 or 2. there's plenty of cheapo memories with high latencies (cas3) that are just not worth a cent imho.

hacktavist

If I buy pc 3700 will it work without overclocking?
I might not overclock right away.

Whats dual channel mean?
Will this work?
I have about 100 euro to spend on a 512 block.

netman

PC3700 will work without overclocking, they're all downward compatibile, but usually have higher latencies. So if you plan on using the memory at 166Mhz or 200Mhz you're better off with a fast PC2700 or PC3200 memory, and it will cost you less.

Dual channel means if you have two memory sticks in your nForce motherboard, it will read/write to both at once, thus doubling your memory bandwidth.

This doesn't really have a huge impact on performance on AMD systems, other than memory benchmarks. You'd get about 2-5% improvement. But you can view it as a freebie - the motherboard already supports it, if you get one 512MB stick now, and decide to upgrade later on and get another 512MB stick, you'll also get a little bit of a boost from dual channel memory access.

for a 100 euro range, check out the CAS latency 2 TwinMOS module.