jbryant

Hi there everyone,

There seems a lot of PC Power freaks out there in scoobyworld and I thought this would be the best place to go for a decent answer without being called a <n00b> or something

Just buying a A7N8X board, and needed to know what memory to get. It seems the new v2.0 revision of the board is DDR400, rather than DDR333 (which is nice!) However I've got a few questions which are:

1. I guess I should be looking to buy PC3200 Ram instead of PC2700? Will 2700 still work?

2. Also, I've seen threads elsewhere saying that you get better performance using two sticks of memory (eg. use 2 x 256Mb sticks instead of 1 x 512Mb. Is this true? Sounds like a backwards step to me and more expensive to buy.

3. The price of the memory (especially DDR400) varies wildly, especially with the Corsair stuff that seems recommended in many places. Is this really worth double the price?

Cheers
Joolz

ChrisB

Which Athlon CPU are you going for?

Corsair is pricey but has a good reputation. Kingston do a range called HyperX which looks to be cheaper.

Search for part codes KHX3200K2/512 (PC3200 2 x 256MB) and KHX3200K2/1G (PC3200 2 x 512MB) here. The 512MB kit looks to be pretty good value at £89+VAT. A Corsair TwinX PC3200 512MB kit is £112+VAT. If Nick (Mr Footlong) reads this, I'd be interested to hear his thoughts on the HyperX. I've used Kingston in a lot of Compaq servers without any problems.

The NForce2 board uses something called Dual Channel memory access. In theory, by running two sticks of RAM, you get better performance than a single stick. That said, the new VIA Athlon chipset isn't far behind the NForce2 and that only uses a single channels. Go for two sticks with the A7N8X though.

[Edited by ChrisB - 5/28/2003 2:05:37 PM]

jbryant

I was looking at something like the
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (1.83GHz) *333 FSB* Barton though I really don't know the differences and am just going on the speed values. This seemed pretty good value at abot £75.

Hopefully with this motherboard I'd be able to upgrade the processor in a year or so for a faster model for pennies... I'm not looking for rocketship performance or overclocking - just fast fast stable. As I'm coming from a Slot A 600Mhz anything's better than that!!!

Oh and this is for games and video editing...

Joolz

[Edited by jbryant - 5/28/2003 2:09:53 PM]

what would scooby do

I have the a7n8x running with 2*512mb PC2700 and it's pretty quick as it is. Only got athlon xp1900+ at moment, so about to upgrade v.soon.

Miles

The earlier revisions of the A7N8X board can handle the DDR400Mhz stuff, my A7N8X Deluxe rev 1.06 is happily talking to a pair of Samsung PC3200 256Mb sticks

Dirty_Den

I believe that the A7N8X doesn't like Corsair memory.

I've got a A7N8XD, just one 512MB SIMM. Some of the reviews I've read suggest putting SIMMs in slots 1 & 3 if you are going to pair them up - apparently it's a little faster.

Den

Miles

According to the manual,
The below info on the approved memory for the A7N8XD is from here:

Memory QVL TABLE DDR 400 Table DIMM Vendor DIMM Part No. CL size Side DIE
Vendor DIE Part No.
Samsung M368L6423 DTM-CC4 3 512MB Double Samsung K4H560838D-TCC4
Samsung M368L3223 DTM-CC4 3 256MB Single Samsung K4H560838D-TCC4
Adata BDMA83A 2.5 256MB Single Winbond W942508BH-5
TwinMOS MDouble TTUF08108L294 K4FW0/T 2.5 256MB Single TwinMOS TMD7608F 8E50B
Winbond W9451GBDB-5 2.5 512MB Double Winbond W942508BH-5
TwinMOS 2.5 512MB Double Winbond W942508BH-5
TwinMOS 2.5 256MB Single Winbond W942508BH-5
Kingston KVR400X64 C25/256 2.5 256MB Single Winbond W942508BH-5
Corsair CMX512-3200C 2XMS3202 v1.1 2.5 512M Double


[Edited by Miles - 5/28/2003 10:16:04 PM]

Miles

Me again, found a bigger list of both 333Mhz and 400Mhz approved memory here.

jbryant

Thanks everyone - found the above very useful and have done some more digging with my new found knowledge... Someone else summarised very well with what I needed to know in a memory test on a hardware sites found in a google search:

Conclusion
For those of you after the highest performance possible, then DDR400 is definitely the way to go, but apart from bragging rights and a marginal increase, most of you will not reap the benefits of going to DDR400. If we were talking single channel configurations, we would definitely see a larger performance increase when going from PC2700 to PC3200, especially in the P4 systems. However Dual Channel memory setups are really showing their worth and as you can see from the above results, Dual Channel PC2700 can keep most systems happy, especially with other limiting factors such as graphics cards and harddrives keeping the performance down.


As I'm not a performance junkie (getting the Asus board for featureset and nforce2) it looks like I'll be getting myself a pair of 256Mb PC2700.
£90 buys me about 2x256Mb PC3200 (of the cheap stuff, at that!) The money I'll save on getting PC2700 instead could be much better spent elsewhere. (...wanders off muttering about video cards!)

Cheers everyone for the excellent advice!
Joolz