Saiyan_Overlord said:
A hardrive is slow to say none the least, and in my eyes anythnig that can possibly make it even a tad faster is worth it.
The hard drive limits itself. Nothing in a current system will make it slower, really. It spins and reads data off of the discs in milliseconds, far slower than the nanoseconds RAM takes.
The 1gig sitcks do sound like a good option, however to run in dual channel (supposedly the amd memory controller love dual channel + low latency memory), You would by them in kits rather then by one stick now and one later, as things could possibly change (they could change the memory chips they use on the ram board or the ram board itself)
Yes, I know that it takes 2 sticks to run in dual channel, and I only suggested one as Dual Channel isn't as great as many people say it is. AMDs aren't bandwidth bottlenecked, oh no, they're latency bottlenecked. Also, if you buy the same stick later down the road, it'll go into dual channel easily. If you have two different speed sticks, the faster one will default to the slower one, which will most likely allow dual channel, once again, easily. Just make sure they both contain the same amount of memory.
Dual core is a tempting option, but in his price range it couldn't really fit well for an overall setup. You could wait for Socket AM2 to be release (due Q2 of this year as far as I remember), witch will bring ddr2 support to the AMD side of the market. Socket 939 would become the value segment, and dual core chips on s939 could have a price fall when Socket AM2 comes out.
Socket 939 will be discontinued probably once AM2 is out.
Hmm.. that psu you posted seems to have a few complaints to it's name from newegg customers, it died on one person.
Nothing is perfect, but I know from personal experience that that is a really great PSU.
A benchmark I read recently showerd the effect of timing and memoy capacity in F.E.A.R and a few other games, and a 1gb kit was getting a better framerate then a 2gb kit (I'll try and chase that up for you smith).
Maybe show a link? If I had to guess as to why that is, I have a few reasons: A) 2x 512 vs 4x 512 and on an AMD system = 2t timing for the 2048, which is comparable to a loss of ~30MHz. B) They used lower quality RAM for the 2GB because they couldn't find comparitable memory at the time.
F.E.A.R seemed to of showed better performance in some ways with the lower timings.
... of course? Do you expect F.E.A.R.'s FPS to go down with lower FPS? And judging by this little tad of your post, I'm guessing it
was 4x 512.
I was looking at theyre performance series PC3200, with a latency of 3-3-3-7 for the 2x1024MB as opposed to 2x the premier series PC3200 2x512MB, with a latency of 2.5-3-3-7. For 2 GB, both are $240... unless I find a deal on eBay, which has been known to happen.
The earliest I would be buying any of this would be the end of summer, so its not like its do-or-die time for a new computer.
If they're both $240, go with the 2GBs of 3-3-3-7, most definitely.
There are better 2gig kits out there, such as the ocz kit I posted earlier (If you can afford them, 2-3-2-5, witch are also $240 on newegg). But as said before it might just be better off if you wait for Socket AM2 witch will bring ddr2 support to AMD based setups. DDR2 is also cheaper then ddr atm, but samsung are reporting shortages on the chips, so the prices could very well soon rise to that of current DDR modules, witch are currently more expensive then some DDR2 offerings.
AMD most likely won't be releasing Socket AM2 with DDR2 support until DDR2 can get affordable timings comparable to DDR1. If they don't wait, they'd just be shooting themselves in the foot.