Memory upgrade on Gigabyte K8Ns-Pro

[jfallara]

I'm thinking of upgrading the ram on my PC. The mobo is a a Gigabyte K8Ns-Pro running an Athlon 64 3000+. I do a lot of gaming. I currently have Kingston 2x512Mb PC2700 chips installed. I'm thinking of upgrading to 2x1Gb PC3200 DIMMs.

My first question is: Should I go to Registered? Or will the non-Registered RAM be fine?

My second, but more nagging question is: Will this help my gaming performance? My video card is an ATI Radeon X800 XL 256Mb DDR3 AGP. I'm not looking to upgrade the video card...there's only a couple above it anyway.

It seems like I experience most stuttering when lots of new textures or elements are loading or being presented. It seems to me if I upgrade both the size and speed of my RAM that I should see improvement. Am I off the wall here?

I'm sure I'll buy the RAM anyway. It's so cheap these days, plus I do a lot of Photoshop work, so I know I'll use it anyway. I just want a barometer to help set my expectations.

 

[sturm]

What are you running the FSB at? pc2700 only runs at 333 while your cpu should be running at 400. I would go ahead and get the 2x1gb chips and make sure the fsb is running at 400 (200x2). You will deffinetly see an improvement. Dont worry about registered ram. It wont help your speed at all.

 

[jfallara]

Not sure of the FSB at the moment (not in front of that PC), nor could I quickly find the spec online :?

But I know the mobo supports up to DDR400, so it should be ok. I'm happy to hear you say I'll see a performance upgrade. But will it be in Windows Apps, Games, or both?

Thanks again!

 

[baracuda73]

Athlon 64 should be 400mhz fsb the ram would be an improvement. Most online games for sure love ram. I run 2GB and would like to upgrade to 4GB i don't run registered and seem to run as well as others that do.

 

[sturm]

youll see an improvement over all.

 

[sturm]

what do you need 4gb for? I can see haveing 4gb on a high end video editing or sound editing or on a server, but 4 gb on a gameing machine is a total waste. Not to mention it could actually slow your system down.