DDR-266 - DDR-400 Speed increase?

[TeeJayHoward]

Well, I finally managed to do it. My first successful A64 OC. I've been overclocking my computers the second I buy them since the days of my mom's old PacBell P-120, but the A64 had me stumped. I finally narrowed it down to the memory. I've got 2x 256MB Crucial DDR-266 sticks in my machine, and had to drop it down to DDR-200 for the OC to be successful. After all is said and done, this 266DDR that the BIOS shows as being 200 is running at 280. Hurray!

Well, sliding off my ego trip there, I present to you this question: Would getting DDR-400+ actually help my system run noticably faster? I need to upgrade to at least a gig of ram for certain applications **coughmayacough** and obviously I'm going to go for the fast stuff, but just how much of an influence will the ram speed have on my system? Also, should I be going for lower timings or faster speeds? (Ex. DDR-500@2.5-3-3-6 vs. DDR-400@2.5-2-2-4 (Both numbers I just made up))

One more thing: I recall reading a post or two about people saying, "You dropped your ram speed down to 333 for that 200Mhz OC? You do realize that your system is running SLOWER now, not faster, right?" Could someone explain this to me?

When it comes to processors, I think I have a decent understanding, but memory is my weak point right now.

 

[tsuehpsyde]

Give the thread in my sig a read, it should help out.

And if you're going to overclock, just but a gig (2x512) of most any memory that runs 2-2-2-5 @ 200MHz (DDR400) and you'll be able to overclock that pretty well since almost all 2-2-2-5's are TCCD chips.