I would like to buy some memory for my P4PE that will be fast enough to put
into a P4C800 when I upgrade.
I will sell the crucial 512meg pc2700 and buy 2 sticks of 512meg corsair
that will go into a P4C800 when I get the money.
Thanks for any advice
Colin
Why not wait until you are ready to buy the P4C800 ? Chances are there
will be a more desirable motherboard by then, and you never know what
kind of memory it will take. (For example, a motherboard that can
take a real Prescott or a motherboard with a Vcore power circuit
that is ready to handle Prescott power consumption. Despite all
claims by motherboard manufacturers, running a Prescott S478 in an
existing motherboard is an experiment that remains to be tried.)
There is a table in the P4C800 manual that looks like this:
CPU FSB DDR DIMM Type Memory Frequency
800 MHz PC3200/PC2700*/PC2100 400/333*/266 MHz
533 MHz PC2700/PC2100 333/266 MHz
400 MHz PC2100 266 MHz
*When using 800MHz CPU FSB, PC2700 DDR DIMMs may run only at
320MHz (not 333MHz) due to chipset limitation.
Basically, you can use almost anything in it. Since the P4C800
can run in dual channel mode, single channel mode, or virtual
single channel mode, even one stick of memory will work. If
you plan on overclocking a FSB800 processor, you can use PC3200
memory and use the 5:4 divider for FSB:memory ratio. If you have
deeper pockets, you could buy PC4000 memory and use a 1:1
divider ratio. What you choose really depends on your budget -
the idea is there is a diminishing return when buying expensive
ram, so a couple sticks of PC3200 CAS3 is more than adequate for
most normal uses for the computer. If the computer is intended
for a business, then expensive memory can be paid off by increased
productivity, while for hobby uses there are no such economics at
work.
If you are planning on using four sticks, then it is more likely
that PC3200 will be good enough, as the memory bus doesn't overclock
quite as well when four sticks are used. Do a search on the
forums of Abxzone.com for more success stories with ram and what
the posters used to do it.
As for the P4PE, Asus has a webpage concerning operating the board
with a FSB800 processor and one stick of PC3200 ram. You need a
recent BIOS upgrade to do it. The board cannot run two
sticks at DDR400 rates when run like this, neither can it
be overclocked above FSB800. If you buy two sticks of PC3200 now
for the P4PE and a P4-C processor, chances are it and the related
FSB speed will be lower than FSB800/DDR400.
There is a recent article on Tomshardware, where they investigate
the benefits of expensive memory. While I'm not crazy about
the programs they used to test, at least you can see how little
difference the timing numbers make to performance. Clock rate is
the thing that helps the most.
HTH,
Paul
