£100 to spend on 1GB of RAM - which sticks?

[Ruggerbugger]

As it's my birthday soon, I'll have about £100 that I want to spend on 1GB of RAM. I'm after recommendations for sticks that will (hopefully) allow me to overclock the system in my sig, as my current RAM won't shift even 1MHz without causing errors.

What sticks would you recommend?

Should I get dual channel or a 1GB stick with an eye on future upgrades?

Cheers

[mike_w]

Definately two sticks of 512. 1GB sticks seem to have lower latencies/slower speeds than 512 sticks, which is definately a factor if you're overclocking.

[skattrd]

Theres a few good/cheap options atm, been looking myself and got it down to these 2 :

Adata pc3700 TCC5

Twinmos pc3500 BH-5

Personally I think I'm going to go for the TCC5 - as it takes less voltage and I've heard some people have got this stuff to 300mhz+

I wouldn't get 1GB sticks personally as they're more expensive, and generally overclock badly

[Ruggerbugger]

The Adata stuff looks pretty good, not bad pricing either.

[skattrd]

BH-5 is better for lower speed/tighter timings and is great overclocking stuff if you give it a few volts. The TCC5 won't do the same timings as the BH-5 but should do higher speeds ..... with overclocking though nothing is guarenteed

[Ruggerbugger]

Is it worth going for the immediate benefit of DDR433/466/500 on my mobo? It seems to me that even if the CPU wouldn't handle the maximum speed of the RAM, I'd still be able to go faster than I can at the moment.

[skattrd]

Nowadays there is a tendancy to ignore the ratings on the RAM, well I do at least.

The chips that the RAM is made of are much more important than rated speed, most TCCD RAM is rated pc3200 (DDR400) but will do DDR500+ and then there is the consideration of timings as well ...... standard DDR433 etc. might have rubbish chips on it which can do the rated speed and no more, but at bad timings. BH-5 is generally rated DDR400 or 433, but the last BH5 I had did DDR500 (pc4000) @ 5,2,2,2 ......

[Ruggerbugger]

Blimey!

So BH5 chips are better all round? How do you get on with your Corsair XMS3500?

[skattrd]

Sold the Corsair the other week, but that was good for 250 5,2,2, @3.2v - I'm currently playing with various different stuff atm as I'm having a bit of a change around.
I have just ordered some of that TCC5 to see if I like that, I can tell you what thats like in a couple of days if you want

[Ruggerbugger]

I'm leaning towards this TwinX memory at the moment. It's a premium price compared to the Adata stuff, but seems to get good reviews.

[mike_w]

I'm leaning towards this TwinX memory at the moment. It's a premium price compared to the Adata stuff, but seems to get good reviews.

Don't forget that it will only run at CAS2 (guaranteed) on Intel platforms. If you try it on an AMD machine, it's not guaranteed to run at CAS2 (default is 2.5).

[BUFF]

Don't forget that it will only run at CAS2 (guaranteed) on Intel platforms. If you try it on an AMD machine, it's not guaranteed to run at CAS2 (default is 2.5).

Until you feed it lots of volts (will run upto 3.7V happily)