Which Ram ?

[poonsies]

Ive been browsing Scan and im a little unsure what memory to use with this setup:

* AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4400+ S939 1MB (2.2) Retail inc Heat Sink Fan & 3 Years Warranty £349.49
* 250Gb SATA300 Hitachi (IBM/HGST) Deskstar T7K250 (7200rpm,8M) £75.45
* Asus A8N32-SLi Deluxe 939 NF4 Dual x16 SLi DDR400 SATAII Raid 2xGbE Lan 8Ch Audio £156.26
* Gainward PowerPack! Ultra/3500PCX XP VIVO-DVI-DVI Golden Sample - graphics adapter -GF 7800 GTX - 256 MB £358.38
* 580W Tagan 2Force T580-U22 SLi U-Quiet 21db Also support 12v EPS/SATA/XEON 3 Years Warranty ATX/BTX £74.01
* Asetek 06-L-0018 VapoChill Micro Ultra Low Noise AMD S754/S939/S94 £32.23

On an earlier post i suggested 2GB Corsair (2x 1GB) DDR500/PC4000, 2x128Mx64, non-ECC, unbuffered, 3-4-4-8, H/S, L/T Warranty £207.96. But i believe that id have to overclock to get the most out of this ram.

The other choice i have is 2GB (2x1GB) Corsair, PC3500LLPRO (**A8N32-SLI**), 2-3-2-6, 2x184p unbuffered non-ECC DIMM. which comes in about £14 more expencive but seems to have my motherboards name added by Scan. The timings seem much tighter, but then again it isnt DDR500.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Sean.

[nvening]

You will not get a performance increase in clock speeds of over DDR400 on A64 unless you OC as the FSB is 200MHz. So, get some low latency RAM. (it seems you dont want to OC?)

Also, that cpu cooler is not very good.

[poonsies]

A safe amount of OCing i can handle, im just wondering whether id benefit more from the low latency P3500 memory over the P4000.

Which cooler would you recommend ?

[Zad]

From what I gather, the retail X2 4400+ has a heatpipe cooler and is well up to the job even if you go overclocking. So I would stay with the stock HSF until you have worked out how far you want to take things. The equivalent Opterons seem to run even cooler still.

I didn't think the A64s suffered that much with latency problems, due to having the onboard memory controller. Memory choice has to be the area of PC speccing that is closest to voodoo!