does 'fancy' ram really make much of a difference?

vibe666

I have stock ram in my system, and was thinking of maybe going for something better, but i'm not convinced it's going to make a big difference.

i have quite a high spec mobo (Abit IC7-MAX3) but my memory is just stock PC2700 DDR from an old office machine. 4x 256's

I saw a weekly special on komplett for these yokes: http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=311017&cks=WYO and wondered if they'd make much of a difference speed wise.

it's still only 1gb, but i was wondering if 3200 would be much faster.

or is there better out there for similar money?

thanks.

masteroftherealm

Simple answer is

If your overclocking: YES
If your not : NO

WizZard

masterofthereal wrote:

Simple answer is

If your overclocking: YES
If your not : NO

That's about the size of it really.
Although you may see some slight improvements with 2x 512mb instead of 4x 256mb sticks, especially if your memory controller supports dual channel.

masteroftherealm

True true but the link to the crucail was cheap ram anyways so yup go for the komplett jobbie and you'll be away in a hack. Make sure ya take the old stuff out though as the new will default to the speed of the slowest ram in the machine

mp3guy

If you overclock with non-fancy ram, it'll get errors.

DemonOfTheFall

Basically what they said. Although you can overclock your PC with cheap ram, you just can't overclock the ram. Need to set a memory divider when overclocking if your ram cant take it.

Eg, I have my FSB set at 265mhz but my XMS C2 can only do 220 mhz so I have to set the 5:6 divider. If you're overclocking to save money then fancy ram just doesnt make sense.

vibe666

righto.

so is the komplett stuff any good?

WizZard

No, but it's faster than what you have now.

unkel

I can't believe nobody has asked vibe666 exactly what cpu he is using. So what is it, vibe666?

If it is a 800FSB P4, you've been using a severely disabled pc! :eek:

vibe666

3ghz P4 (northwood) on the above mentioned board.

here's the board: http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/products.php?categories=1&model=130

so would it be worth upgrading?

can i get better than that without spending too much more money?

WizZard

unkel wrote:

I can't believe nobody has asked vibe666 exactly what cpu he is using. :eek:

/me hangs head in shame...

VeVeX

I have a fairly similar setup as the rig mentioned (see sig).

I originally ran my rig with pc3200 with the divider set at 5:4 but recently upgraded to pc4000 to run at 1:1.

It makes a differance alright but not a fantastic one.

unkel

WizZard wrote:

/me hangs head in shame...

LOL, don't be too hard on yourself

vibe666 wrote:

3ghz P4 (northwood)
so would it be worth upgrading?

can i get better than that without spending too much more money?

Indeed you can. Even with a zero budget, you could swap (or sell and then buy) your 4*256 PC2700 here for 2*512 cheapsh!te PC3200. It will make a HUGE difference

Or if you have a bit of a budget, get higher speed (higher than PC3200 - don't worry to much about latency) ram and overclock. Your mobo is one of the very best mobos for overclocking a Northwood. What cpu HSF do you have?

Basically using cheapo PC3200 will give you about 20% performance increase. Half decent PC4000 will give you up to about 50% performance increase :eek:

djmarkus

vibe666 wrote:

I have stock ram in my system, and was thinking of maybe going for something better, but i'm not convinced it's going to make a big difference.

i have quite a high spec mobo (Abit IC7-MAX3) but my memory is just stock PC2700 DDR from an old office machine. 4x 256's

I saw a weekly special on komplett for these yokes: http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=311017&cks=WYO and wondered if they'd make much of a difference speed wise.

it's still only 1gb, but i was wondering if 3200 would be much faster.

or is there better out there for similar money?

thanks.

You can be lucky with cheap ram tho, i have twinmos PC3200, the cheapeast u can get and it's happily running at 233mhz DDR. in my opinion theres little difference between 2.5 and 2 CAS

vibe666

have it with an xp120 hs and a low speed fan, everything else is passively cooled. northbridge has a big passive heatsink on it (with a few bent pins to get around the huge xp120 and the fan off the xp120 is cooling the NB and the OTES too. took the original NB and OTES cover and little fan off to reduce noise, as those little buggers were really starting to whine something terrible.

have a variable speed psu fan (sharkoon) with a knob on the back, so if i'm doing anything cpu intensive, i just turn the juice up on that, and for bedtimes, i just turn it down again for a peaceful night.

even with no other fans it tops out at 55 degrees under full load, or 65 if i have the fan down low under full load.

doesn't matter too much at the moment, as i'm not overclocking.

was thinking about getting 2 120mm variable speed front and rear fans for some extra cooling, as i have a radeon 9600, 6x 40gb hard drives and 2x 200gb hard drives plus a dvd/cdrw combo and dvd burner all humming away inside it.

i think considering all that, my temps are okay.

unkel

You're setup is fine for some serious overclocking

Steps to take:

1. Get decent PC4000 Ram (cas 2.5 is fine, good brand, e.g. OCZ)

2. Read about overclocking, for serious overclocking you need to raise the vcore (voltage going through your cpu) a bit. For minor overclocking you don't.

3. Keep checking the temps!

4. Check stability of your overclock by running prime95 torture test

Without the vcore raise, you can probably still expect to overclock to 3.3 or 3.4 Ghz. With the raise anywhere within the 3.5-3.8 Ghz is very possible depending on your luck with the CPU

3.8 would mean that your whole pc would be more than 50% faster than it is now :eek:

juliuspret

vibe666 wrote:

have it with an xp120 hs and a low speed fan, everything else is passively cooled. northbridge has a big passive heatsink on it (with a few bent pins to get around the huge xp120 and the fan off the xp120 is cooling the NB and the OTES too. took the original NB and OTES cover and little fan off to reduce noise, as those little buggers were really starting to whine something terrible.

have a variable speed psu fan (sharkoon) with a knob on the back, so if i'm doing anything cpu intensive, i just turn the juice up on that, and for bedtimes, i just turn it down again for a peaceful night.

even with no other fans it tops out at 55 degrees under full load, or 65 if i have the fan down low under full load.

doesn't matter too much at the moment, as i'm not overclocking.

was thinking about getting 2 120mm variable speed front and rear fans for some extra cooling, as i have a radeon 9600, 6x 40gb hard drives and 2x 200gb hard drives plus a dvd/cdrw combo and dvd burner all humming away inside it.

i think considering all that, my temps are okay.

8 Hard Drives!!!
I have 2x300GB and a 30GB, with the 300GB drives contributing a lot to the computers noise.
You must have a lot of molex splitters!!!

vibe666

only two splitters i think, but i've not had any power problems so far.

i got by with 3x 40gb drives for a good while, then i got broadband, and started getting into divx'ing my dvd collection, and the space started running outy pretty damn quickly.

got 1x 200gb drive and some extra 40gb ones that were going spare, and used them with some sata converters to connect them to the sata sockets on the mobo and it just kept growing from there.

have an antec sonata case, so there's a lot of room for them, but it's gettign a little bit tight now, and the last 2 or 3 drives aren't actually screwed in yet, but it's all working and with the psu fan down low it's very quiet at night inside the case.

gonna lap the xp120 and the cpu heatspreader as i made a pigs ear of getting the old thermal compound off it the last time. got some nice 80gr 200gr and 500gr wet and dry to do the job, but lacking in the courage so far. would like to get the northbridge and xp120 more tightly fitting as they could be a little more solidly connected.

i reckon that'll wait till i eventually get the exhaust fans though and start to really play with it.

just built an htpc and my bloody tv won't display the output clearly, so now i'm a bit stuck for what to do. might just sell the bits and use the funds to concentrate on making my main rig more beefy.

unkel

vibe666 wrote:

gonna lap the xp120 and the cpu heatspreader as i made a pigs ear of getting the old thermal compound off

LOL, I wouldn't go there just yet. Just clean it and apply a good thermal paste, like arctic silver 5

Lapping will at best only give you a very marginal decrease in temps. At worst you'd ruin your hardware. Try the other stuff first to achieve max overclock!

BTW my last rig was very similar to yours although I had a mobo with the 865 chipset. Yours should be a better overclocker. My p4c 3.0 (also Northwood) was fully stable @3.6 running all case fans low and Zalman CPU fan at minimum rpm. Maxing these I got stability up to about 3.8

vibe666

i actually gave the heat spreader a bit of a sand down when i got it (off dubdvd) as there was a klot of very thick thermal compound on it but the sandpaper was far too rough, and it's actually left a lot of marks on the heat spreader. while i'm thiking about it, is there such a thing as getting myself a new heat spreader (maybe a copper one) and retrofitting it (if that's the right word) to my cpu?

it's tempting alright.

hmmm.

now if only i had a white persian cat to stroke while laughing maniacally!

unkel

vibe666 wrote:

i actually gave the heat spreader a bit of a sand down when i got it (off dubdvd) as there was a klot of very thick thermal compound on it but the sandpaper was far too rough, and it's actually left a lot of marks on the heat spreader

:eek: You mad?

A bit of isopropylalcohol would dissolve the old thermal paste

savemejebus

unkel wrote:

:eek: You mad?

His desire to have a white persian cat to stroke while laughing maniacally got past you did it

back on topic and not wanting to hijack the thread but would be interested in this, ye kinda dismissed the komplett ram he mentioned earlier as being ok but nothing great, what should he be looking for ram wise and why?

po0k

It's cheap ram with loose timings. Buy only if you want a rig with lots of slow ram.

The specs on Komplett label it as CL3 or CAS Level 3 ram.

vibe666

think the old stuff was one of those thermal pad things, and it was caked on there well and good. it wasn't coming off with alcohol at all. most of it was staying put.

unkel wrote:

:eek: You mad?

A bit of isopropylalcohol would dissolve the old thermal paste

now where's my cat got to?

BloodBath

You can get better matched 1gb sticks cheaper on www.shop4memory.co.uk. Free delivery within 2 days too.

I recomend this:

1Gb kit DDR PC-4000 Dual Channel - GeIL Ultra Platinum 2.5-4-4-7 only 179e

Great price for very nice ram. I've had mine up to 265fsb (530mhz) at those timings.

As for lapping, I wouldn't bother doing it unless the bottom of your heatsink was very badly finished. You don't need a mirror finish for good heat transfer. That's what the paste is for. If you are going to do it check out some guides on doing it properly. You need to be careful to sand it flat with a very high grit paper, think it's start off with something like 800 and work up to 1500. It's a lot more hastle than it's worth seeing as you could make things worse by not sanding completely flat and you're only going to improve things by a couple of degrees if you do it right.

vibe666

not 100% sure what i should be looking for, but i've been looking at a couple of websites, and now i'm more confused than ever!

okay, so i know that PC4000 is going to be better than PC3200, but then i thought lower memory timings were better. but i see the PC4000 memory seems to have worse timings than the PC3200, if I'm reading things right. take a look at this from the crucial site.

512MB DDR PC3200 • 2-2-2-6 • UNBUFFERED • NON-ECC • DDR400 • 2.8V • 64Meg x 64: US $90.99

512MB DDR PC4000 • 2.5-4-4-8 • UNBUFFERED • NON-ECC • DDR500 • 2.8V • 64Meg x 64: US $90.99

same price, compatible with my IC7-MAX3, one 3200 with low timings, and one 4000 with (i think) not as good timings.

so, which to go for? I'd like to push for 2x 512's but i'm just not confident that i know which would be better.

then there's bloodbath's suggestion, which looks good to me, but can i do better.

damn these pc's and their ever changing performance options!

unkel

Don't get PC3200!!!

You will severely limit your potential to overclock. Divider doesn't work well on P4C

Get PC4000 CAS2.5 as BloodBath suggests and tighter timings than that if you can afford it, but it will be expensive

vibe666

so no matter what the timings are 4000 is going to be better than 3200?

damn i wish i'd paid attention in maths.

as soon as i see lots of numbers my head starts to spin!

it's amd really, i've been doing IT related jobs for the last 190 years, but this kind of thing is all complicated to me.

i do fine troubleshooting problems, but never really got too much into the other side of things.

unkel

If you expect to end up reasonably close to 1000FSB (250*4) then you're better of with 2.5,4,4,7 PC4000 compared to 2,2,2,5 PC3200

VeVeX

My rig is as my sig below. I originally had Corsair XMSc2 pc32000 in my system with the divider set to 5:4 this with a FSB of 240 qp equates to a ram speed of 192ddr . I recently upgraded to the GeIL pc4000 to run at 1:1. It did give a performace boost but as I have mentioned before it wasnt fantastic.

I have run into a wall as regards to overclocking my chip the stable limit is 240x15 and even at that the temps are around 46oC load. In saying that my nearly completly last gen system can still well hold its own against new systems.

vibe666

okay, so I'm getting there now.

i read somewhere that it's better off if you have 4 ram slots to use 2 rather than 4 slots (i.e. 2x 512's rather than 4x 256's) but I'm not sure if this would affect me with the mobo i have. think it was only certain configs that this was relevent to.

i'm thinking that I'll go for 2x 512's of whatever I get, rather than 1x 1gb, but i don't know if that would be better. i've been reading about dual channel, and matched pairs etc. etc. and i'm still wondering what would be best for me.

I also need to sell off some bits from my failed HTPC project (TV refresh rate wasn't up to the job, so I'll be trying again when we get a new telly) sempron 2600 mATX cpu, mobo & case, nvidia 5200, maybe a couple of 40gb hard drives and a bit of older ddr ram too. (e.g. look out for the FS thread soon!)