Which memory is better to get for the price versus performance?

Question

I have an AMD athlon 64 3700+ on a Machspeed mobo.
ATI Radeon 300SE 256MB hypermemory (128 board + 128 system) PCI-e

I transferred over a 512 MB PC2100 stick from my old computer. I am looking to upgrade to 1GB. It would be more cost effective to pick up another 512MB to make a combined 1GB. The other way to go is to completely replace the pc2100 in there with pc3200 which would give me better performance.

The price difference is pretty substantial. Seeing that I would have 1GB either way, is there that much of an actual speed difference going from pc2100 to pc3200.

The ATI Radeon's hypermemory shares 128MB system memory which is why I am pondering this.

If I would only see maybe a 10% overall improvement, I think I would be best going cheaper know that I would upgrade again in a few years anyway.

I have four ram slots. one filled

Answer 1

Get the one gig modual if you plan on upgrading and you only have two ram slots. If you are planing on sticking with 1gig of memory, get the two 512 moduals to save money.

Answer 2

I just did a quick check on these two types of RAM.

The PC2100 operates at 266 MHz

The PC 3200 operates at 400 MHz

So the speed of the RAM is substantial. The PC 3200 is 33% faster than the PC2100 in the raw clock speeds.

The question is how do you use your PC and will the increase in RAM speed really be noticeable to you?

Other considerations are: how many RAM slots do you have, and how much RAM will each slot accommodate?

Does the PC perform pretty well with the 512M of PC2100? If it does then I would go with an additional 512M to bring it up to 1G if the economics are a real consideration.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Definitely buy PC3200 as it is faster than what you have and get rid of the PC2100.
Corsair Value Select is inexpensive and I use it. If you just want one gig, get 2 matching 512 meg modules.
Link below: