Quality vs Quantity

[Gardack]

Question for all you memory experts. What makes your system perform better, having 1 gig of cheap PC 3200 ram or 512 megs of higher quality ram with better timings?

I just bought a pair of 512 MB KIngston PC 3200 chips. Think my timings are 2.5, 4, 4, 7 and so far I have no complaints. I figure the better latency chips are mainly for people that like to overclock and get the most performance out of their parts and mine should be fine.

[Morazl]

two words, dual channel.

[Gardack]

Yes, I have an Abit IS7 with dual channel memory support. I have the 2 x 512 Kingston in slots 1 and 3 and my old 2 x 256 Geil in slots 2 and 4.

But I'm planning to build a new system for my wife soon and am starting to shop around for parts so wanted to make sure I get her good parts.

[Cardboard Hammer]

It depends.

If you're paging heavily, the fastest memory in the world isn't going to do you much good.

If you rarely ever use more than 512MB, then more memory isn't going to be much help and will be counter productive if it's slower.

[burningrave101]

If your doing much of anything at all your going to get the best performance from having 1GB of RAM whether its timings are very loose or very tight. Timings doesn't have anything to do with overclockers as anyone that has a machine and wants the best performance out of it should want the tightest timings they can get. Your performance will usually go up at least 3% or more in games if your able to run tight timings of say 2-3-2-5.