PC2700 Ram OR PC3200 Ram, Heatspreader OR Not ?
 

Hey people, I'm just checking to see what your opinions are on the ram situation. First off, I recently got a new motherboard and am gonna finally get rid of this PC2100 ram and step up, but I'm torn with options here, ha ha ha.

First off, on my motherboard will handle up to 2-gigs of PC2700 or 1-gig of PC3200, so I'm kinda thinking about just buying three 512 meg sticks of PC2700 ram giving me 1.5-gigs of ram. Would you say that it's better to have that or 1-gig or PC3200 ram ?? From what I've been reading around in reviews, sites say that the PC3200 ram doesn't show much improvement in most cases, so that's why I ask.

ALSO, there's the heatspreader niche going on. Do you think that it's worth paying the extra for the heatspreaders. I don't overclock my stuff, so if that's the only reason to have it, then I don't need it :)

Any input would be appreciated.

This is for a home computer? I hardly doubt you will ever use all that memory. 512 ddr or sd is more than enough for most people.

Yep, it's for a home system, BUT I'm a gamer :)

pc2700 regular kingston would be fine for you situation (without heat spreaders), go at 1gb, really. more than that and you're probably really not going to get any benefit, even running lots of hefty apps and games.

if you're not overclocking, you probably really don't need the heat spreaders.

was going to get some corsair xms 3200 in my system i just ordered, but i decided to save some cash, so i got a good deal for some kingston hyperx 2700 512's, and they came with heat spreaders. i'm pretty happy with it, haven't oc'd the system much yet, but the memory seems pretty good. it's only like 10-15$ more than regular kingston ram. plus, they have some of the nicer looking heat spreaders :)

depends on what you game in, but my new system with a 2400+ (currently at 2.13ghz), 1gb kingston hyperx, and radeon 9700 pro 128 will run ut2k3 flawlessly @ 1600x1200x32, whereas my 2000+ with 512mb 2100 would not (same video card). in fact, it ran it pretty poorly, and level changes took forever. now it pretty much runs like the old ut. i also dropped the wd 8mb cache hdd's in, so that makes a bit of speed difference for loading as well. it will be a tad slower if you don't have that :)

hope that helps.

Thanks for the input iroc409, We think a lot alike here with our systems. I have an Athlon 2100XP, All In Wonder Radeon 9700 Pro, 80-Gig WD 8-meg buffer HD, and Kingston is the brand of ram that I've been looking at, their regular and HyperX versions :)

I think that I'll just stick with the PC2700 ram :)

Be sure your motherboard can actually take advantage of PC3200. Some motherboards (like mine) will take PC3200 but the bus speed limits the usefulness of the RAM to the same as PC2700.

I would buy the 1.5 gigs of PC2700 over 1 gig of PC3200.

SpaceAce

Thanks, I'll have to dig into that, here's my board here -
http://www.asrockamerica.com/Products/K7S8X.htm

I'll ask you another question, I've been a Kingston ram man for a while now, but some people say that one is better than the other. I've been thinking about picking up some Crucial ram instead because there's been some nice reviews on it over at NewEgg.com, so I wonder if it's worth paying the extra for that ??