Thanks for the reply, Dave. I just found that my mobo will support up to
PC3200, so I think I'll go for that. (Difference in price is negligible).
I'll be going from 640Megs of PC2100 RAM to 1 Gig of PC3200. The vidcard is a
Radeon 9700 Pro (pretty high-end), and the CPU is an AthlonXP2100 (not so
high-end).
I guess the CPU is the slow link at the moment, but the mobo only supports up
to an AthlonXP 2600 (266 FSB version), which is hard to find, and a 2400 which
is available but isn't much of an improvement.
I just figure that, with WinXP Pro, I could use more RAM than what I have
now. If I'm getting more RAM, I may as well get the fastest that my system
supports. I'm not ready to replace the mobo yet (can't stomach having to
possibly re-format my hard drive and re-install apps), but if/when I do,
hopefully PC3200 RAM will also be compatible with it.
> > Thanks for the link, Andi! Any thoughts on whether jumping from
> > PC2100 to PC2700 is worthwhile in terms of system performance?
> only if the rest of your system is high end. The ammount of memory can
> sometimes be more beneficial than the speed, if you are limited in
> resources, then windows steps in to move stuff around...not good for top
> performance.
> Faster memory is good, but ranks behind CPU and VideoCard upgrades as
> far as noticable improvements. Computer performance is always kind of a
> messy situation, if you upgrade the cpu, your memory can hold you back, or
> a hot video card mated with an older motherboard or cpu can deliver less
> than satifactory performance.
> I think we will see that the more we spend, the smaller the performance
> increases are. We don't see much top speed difference between an 9800 vs
> the 800XT but the 9800 will bog down quicker...so we will be buying
> consistancy vs sheer speed increases for a while.
> dh