Upgrade from Athlon XP

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a1rocketpilot

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I'm going to finally upgrade my system from an Athlon XP 2200+ Thoroughbred to an A64. I've pretty much decided on the 3200 Venice as well as the MSI K8N NEO2 Platinum. I am confused however on what RAM to get. Would going for low latency/low clock speed be better than a higher latency with a high clock speed? I am planning to overclock, so that is a consideration. Also, am I making a good motherboard choice for overclocking? Be aware that parallel ATA and AGP are important for me as I'm not changing my GPU or my hard drive right now. Thanks
 
have you considered the DFI nf3 939 board? The only reason I bring this up is that it has vdimm options of 3v+, which usually requires a DDR booster. Twinmos SP is either ch-5 or bh-5 (it varies), and will run very high speeds at low latencies with 3-3.6v. It is also very affordable, 2x512 will cost under $100 shipped from newegg. My twinmos is CH-5, and I got to 265 1.5-2-2-6 (everything tight in the bios as well) with 3.55v and a 80mm panaflo on them. I run it at 240 1.5-2-2-6 with 3.41vdimm right now, though I just put heatspreaders on them (copper pc toys, pretty heavy, I like them ok for $3 a pop) and they could do more I'm sure. This is all 100% memtest stable.

So if you want some super fast ram at a cheap price (and have the vdimm to do it, IMO the nf3 is a really good board, DFI rocks) get some twinmos SP 3200.
 
I looked at that board, but it doesn't look like it supports parallel ATA. I'm not updating my hard drive at the moment, so I will need PATA at least for a little while. Expandability to SATA is perfectly ok though, just that I need at least 1 PATA input.
 
I'm looking at that same DFI mobo- I think the specs just don't list the IDE connections, but there are two IDE connections on the mobo- look at the pics, the one of the mobo shows two IDE connections as well as floppy. If you check the DFI website it lists the IDE connections.

I'm buying it when I get paid tomorrow!
 
Argh! I forgot to look at the pic, looks like you're right. Something else I'm concerned about with this board is the clearance around the processor. I'm going to use a Zalman 7000AlCu cooler, will that have enough room on that board?
 
if you bought the MSI board, would it already support the Venice cores or do you need to find a way to flash to the latest BIOS?
 
So I would not be losing anything by using the DFI board over the MSI one? And were you referring to the MSI board being quirky with the Venice core?
 
well i meant if you happened to have a bios that doesn't really support revE cpu's, it would be quirky

and imo, dfi > msi
(and ive owned both.. i love em, but the dfi wins for overclocking)
 
Excellent, thanks for all your input on the issue, I think I'm going to go with DFI for this one. Now, onto my second question about RAM, what would be my best choice? Should I stick with low latency/low clock speed or the other way around? Which would be best for overclocking?
 
imo the twinmos sp is the way to go even if you just want something that'll do 1.5-2-2-6 with 2.9v-3v, which won't really need a fan.
 
Thanks for all your input guys. I guess I am going to go with the DFI board along with the TwinMOS RAM. This'll certainly save me some money over the Corsair that I was going to go with. Oh well, more money for other things I guess!
 
yea ram don't really matter too much to an a64. Its much better to use the saved money from ram to pump into a better gfx card. If your oc'ing go with DFI and a pair of twinmos and run it on dividers and you won't see much of a drop than running 1-1

Ram is actually the least cost effective way of raising performace (not talking about the size here only on the timings). You would hardly see a difference between cas2 and cas2.5. Now gfx cards/cpu scale much better in cost effectivness
 
acidic said:
yea ram don't really matter too much to an a64. Its much better to use the saved money from ram to pump into a better gfx card. If your oc'ing go with DFI and a pair of twinmos and run it on dividers and you won't see much of a drop than running 1-1
Click to expand...

It's more the middle timings that matter (ie, 1.5-"2-2"-6), and dividers don't hurt performance at all, they do bring down the frequency, but 250@1:1 vs 250@1:2 (500HTT) will result in the exact same performance.
 
Save more money and keep your old ram. Run a divider if you have to.
 
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