Proposed athlon system - some component help please

[asdicus]

I fully admit to knowing next to nothing about the technical details of memory. I have no desire to overclock as I believe the pc will be plenty fast enough for my gaming needs. Reliability and stability are important for me rather than outright speed.

The memory I picked from scan is
1Gb 2x512Mb Corsair, DDR400/PC3200,128Mx64, non-ECC, 184 DIMM, unbuffered, CL2.5 *2 ie 4*512 total
The other option is roughly twice the price of the corsair value ram
1 Gb (2 x 512 Mb) Corsair TwinX-XL, DDR, PC3200XLPT, Cas 2 *2 ie 4*512 total

As I am not an extreme gamer or overclocker is there any need to pay the extra money for the faster ram ?

[GhostRider2069]

I Think Patriot has 2x1Gb Kits with Winbond UTT chips, I think that @ 200mhz they run 2-2-2-5 but i'm not sure about how much voltage You have to give to they work at that tight timings.

[dangel]

I'm thinking of building a new system with this motherboard but i'm going with the 3800+ X2 Athlon as several sites found it very easy to run this processor at 2.4ghz (stock is 2.0 i think) without upping the memory speed - i.e. the memory is still 400mhz so no stability issues (or the need for expensive memory). If you're on a budget this is going to save you a lot of money. I too want a 100% stable system but I have that now with my heavily overclocked AthlonXP Mobile so it is quite possible.

[kempez]

Running 4 x 512mb sticks will set the timing to 2T which is not good. I would get 2 x 1gb kit so as to avoid this. OCZ do a nice kit (expensive tho) and GEIL Value Perfomance do a great vfm kit.

As for the GTX/r520 - not sure how much faster the ATI one would be but the 7800GT and GTX are excellent cards - I can testify to that.

For gaming - an A64 4000+ would be better than an X2 - unless you can afford a 4800+ - in which case you may as get an FX-55/57

[dangel]

But if you're running at 3800+ X2 @ 2.4ghz surely that's a damn fast cpu no matter what way you look at it ?

Read:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q3.../index.x?pg=15

[Beer Moon]

I have to highly recommend the Zalman 7000/7700 Line of CPU coolers. I have run the 7000 for 2 years now and it is super quiet and an excellent cooler.

It looks cool, it works great, and it is quiet as a mouse.

[nvening]

someone told me the X2 4400+ is basically two 3500+'s on one die. so if ur playing single threaded games. ur only using one core. but its still fast enough imo although u can push more framerates with an 4000+

i know alot of people will say stick to single core now, preferably amd64 4000+ and upgrade in about 12-16 months time.

its entriely up to you mate lol.

Next games (unreal 3 engine esp) will use dual core. BUT, apparently they will use one core for ai and one core for physics, when the PPUs come out ni dont know what will happen, but i would go dual.