Ram speeds and latency

lovely?

lovely?

Active Member
hi im looking to buying my new rig, and since my budget went up a little im looking to pretty much max out my useable ram, (vista 32 bit) and get 3GB.

all four sticks of ram are ddr2 800, but the two 1GB sticks have much better timings then the 2 512MB sticks do.

the timings on the 1GB sticks is 4-4-4-12-2T and the timing for the 512 sticks is 5-5-5-18... they are the same brand, (a-data) and the price is great, under 100$ for 3GB of ram is nice, but will the lower end 512's pull the other sticks down too? if so, i will not buy them, and stick with 2GB for the moment.
 
You will end up seeing problems mixing two different types of memory even by the same brand there. You would better off going for a pair of 512s seeing the same timings as the 1gb dimms. Simply mixing slower ram would see the faster slowed down while different latencies points at two different types like mixing value ram with performance dimms. Have any links for the memory you are looking at?
 
One looks shows another problem namely voltage settings! The 512s see 1.8v while the pair of 1gb dimms sees 2-2.1v there. That plainly shows two important items that would work against you there.
 
oh wow those things will really cause problems? in the rig in my sig, i have some buffalo 256 value ram and then 1GB stick of highperformance OCZ ram... and they are different voltages, do you think thats doing anything?
 
The idea is to stay with the same type of memory to avoid running into problems from the start. With the bios setting on auto the happy medium was probably seen where the board is providing 1.9v for both 1,8v and 2v memory if there was a difference with those. You would need a program like PC Wizard or something similar besides a look in the bios itself to see what the actual voltages are there.
 
soo im probably running slower right now because of the two different rams, or the voltages are just screwed? hmm let me find them brb

this is my OCZ: 1GB card
and the buffalo ram is so rare nowadays (came with the comp) that i could only find it on buffalo's website: 256MB card
 
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Both are DDR400 memory. But the OCZ 1gb dimm has the same CAS 3 3-3-8 timings that my old pair of Corsair xms series DDR400 performance dimms saw at 2.5v. Another 1gb of the same OCZ memory would be the thought there for your old build to see the best results. Likewise you want to go with that in mind for the new build.
 
You shouldn't have many problems mixing the two sets. However, why don't you just get 2GB? You're going to have a very hard time maxxing out 2GB.
 
instead of spending 100$ on another stick, im just gonna buy 3GB of ddr2 800 and an AMD 5600 and overclock it, much smarter way to spend that money
 
Mixing Cas 5 with Cas 4 memory even by the same brand may not see the results you want there. Plus when going over 2gb and filling all of the dimm slots you lose the option for the dual channel mode on most boards.
 
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