Which is better for Vista?

[Godofdestrcution]

This is on a backup machine, my two main machines have 2 gigs of ram, and my laptop has 1 gig.

For a 2500+, we had 512 megs and tried to use Vista (Yes we know, dumb). It kept crashing.

We had 512 megs of hyperx memory in it. We had it at cas latency 2.0.

We got two more 512 meg modules. A centon 512 that was on sale at compusa, and another hyperx module on sale at outpost.

The centon is a peice of junk, bad timings, 3.0 latency. The hyperx is great, good timings, can do 2.0 latency.

Right now we have the hyperx and the centon in, and hafta use 3.0 latency and lower timings.

While it doesn't crash, loading times are much slower.

This machine is really for surfing the web.

With all this in mind, which is better: 1.5 gigs of high latency ram, and bad timings, or 1 gig of hyperx ram, and 2.0 cas latency, and good timings? Which would be better for vista?

I have another machine that only has 512 megs and I got it vista (Yeah I just got about 5 paid for versions of vista)... It's a 1800+ and only has two memory slots, and they are taken up by 256 meg ram chips . After just spending a bunch of money on stuff, I really don't have the money to get it 1 gig, nor do I really care about a 1800+, so I kinda think putting the centon in the athlon would help it out alot...

 

[bbz_Ghost]

Sounds like you're allowing yourself to get caught up in the "oh my god it's CAS2 vs CAS3" BS. If it works, then great, use it, but don't get stuck worrying so much about tweaking and getting that last .02421% performance difference because of the CAS timings - and yes I'm being facetious here.

Worrying so much about such a trivial thing is simply ridiculous, by any account. For Vista, the more RAM the better, so obviously the 1.5GB would be better overall regardless of the timings since Vista would have more "room to breathe" as the saying goes.

Keep this analogy in mind:

Think of the 1GB faster CAS stuff as a Ferrari, and the 1.5GB slower CAS stuff as a Cadillac.

The Ferrari might be faster, but if you've ever ridden in one, you'd understand that it's like being in a paint shaker in some respects: every little imperfection in the road just slams into you and jars the crap outta your senses, aside from the fact you feel like you're in the cockpit of a rocket with no room to even scratch your balls.

Now sit back and relax in the Cadillac as you sink into the plush seats with so much room it's like a sofa, and you're not going to notice anything smaller than a crevasse in the road that simply consumes the entire vehicle at one time.

For me and most people, screw the Ferrari, we'll take the comfortable ride.

 

[Godofdestrcution]

Well it's only Vista Home Basic. I saved the good copies of Vista for my good pcs

It's running great at 1 gig. The 2500+ uses my old 9600 pro so it has some juice to power it...

 

[drizzt81]

Sounds like you're allowing yourself to get caught up in the "oh my god it's CAS2 vs CAS3" BS. If it works, then great, use it, but don't get stuck worrying so much about tweaking and getting that last .02421% performance difference because of the CAS timings - and yes I'm being facetious here.

As bbz said -and I am sure that a visit to the memory forums will confirm this- the difference between cas2.0-2.5-3.0 is rather small. I would be rather surprised if that had a measurable impact on your boot time.

 

[Godofdestrcution]

I had to put the ram in the 1800+.

Not the centon, the Hyperx!

The damn Athlon 2500+ wouldn't turn on when I put it in. I hate the damn thing, it took me FOREVER to get the centon to work, and I could not get the hyperx to work. The mobo I have it does not like having stuff added to it

Oh, but the Athlon 1800+? Sure, it's ancient, slow as hell (but so is the 2500+ compared to my 3 core 2 duos), but you could stick a load of elephant dung in it and it would turn on

Well, the athlon 1800+ has 768 megs of ram at 2.5 latency, so it's runnign vista home basic decently... it's not crashing anymore...

512 megs at 2100 ram was NOT cutting it.

 

[djnes]

You wouldn't notice loading times being slower simply because you went from CAS2 to CAS3. In fact, I've always thought those ratings were WAAAAY over-hyped. I care about the amount and the speed of my memory, and that's it. I honestly have no idea what CAS rating my Ballistix memory is. It was $200 for 2 GB of DDR2-800, and that's all I cared about.