pc3200, pc3500, pc3700

[LancerJay]

I have an ASUSP4P800 865PE motherboard coming in soon and i'm trying to decide on what ram i should buy that gets the best performance on this motherboard. The max speed on the motherboard for the ram is rated ddr400. I'm thinking I should get two 256mb sticks of ram for now and get two 512mb sticks of ram later down the line. Is this a bad idea or no? And I want to know if there is any benefit of getting faster ram such as pc3500 or pc3700 as compared to the pc3200? I do want to overclock, I'm going to buy a pentium4 2.4c processor soon as well. Any help would be appreciated, I am new to the forums but I read alot on this website. Hardocp is awesome

 

[Jigna]

getting 2 sticks of 256mb now and 512 mb later isnt a bad idea. And of course there is a benefit in getting a pc3700 instead of a pc3200. The faster the better, but since your not going to be overclocking you should stick to the pc3200 unless the price difference between that and a pc3700 isnt that much different.

 

[LancerJay]

I believe i said i DO want to overclock. That's part of the reason why i wanted to know whether or not if there's any benefits to 3200 and 3700 as far as overclocking/performance goes. Even if the motherboard says it's max speed for ram is pc3200 ddr400, i can still use 3700 and get full potential out of it? Thanks for the reply.

 

[dobbz]

yes, you can always buy faster memory. PC3700 and up are always rated with pretty high timings (laggy ram basically) and i was told they generally cant be scaled down at lower speeds. but if you get some quality PC3500 that will pretty much garruntee that the memory will be fine at a 216FSB overclock at its rated timings, and should surely be able to go even faster.