Bring me up to speed on DDR2

[Scarlet Infidel]

My current system thats coming to the end of its life is based on a s478 pentium 4 (it was built for encoding). I know many of you also went for a64 over lga775 for obvious reasons.

This leaves me (and perhaps some of you) with a bit of a problem. Im planning on a conroe system as soon as its viable and i have no idea whats good in the world of DDR2.

I have always been prepared to spend a bit extra to get decent ram but not loads because i know its not good value for money compared to a faster CPU or more ram.

Basically whats good to look out for? I want 2gb and capable of high speed because im going to overclock my conroe as far as its happy to go on water and i like to stay at 1:1.

Now, i could just go with what the manufacturers claim and get a set rated at high speed with decent latency but then i will end up paying a fair amount when there are often better overclocking memory rated less favourably.

I feel ive ranted a lot over nothing and its probably very messy to read, but if you understand id be happy to hear what you have to say. Thanks.

[DanceswithUnix]

I don't think anyone can answer that.

On the A64 the switch to DDR2 has both lowered latency and increased bandwidth, but the CPU was not starved of either so it made not a jot of difference in most benchmarks.

The Conroe will have either 2MB or 4MB of cache, so it too will probably not care much what memory you plug it into. We will only find out in August when people have had time to overclock retail parts rather than review samples.

I would always buy cheap memory, and spend the difference on cars, graphics cards, beer etc