Upgrade Memory Delima/Suggestions for Opteron 180

[double_helix]

Hey guys, I've been reading and doing quite a bit of research on the AMD Opterons. My old AMD64 3000+ wasn't just cutting it anymore and went ahead and upgraded to the AMD Opteron 180. This should last me for another year or two, so thought it'd be a worthy investment. But now I'm facing a delima: I had the Task Manager up and running while playing F.E.A.R. and noticed that even with 1 gig of RAM, the pagefile actually kicked in once I reached around 800MB RAM. Should I put some money into 2 gigs of memory and, if so, should I invest in really tight timings and high performace or stick with value RAM?

My current specs are:
AMD Opteron 180 (stock; no OC)
Corsair valueSELECT 2x512 DDR400 RAM
1x120GB Samsung
2x250GB WDs RAID0
PNY Verto 7900GS 256MB Video Card (Thinking of selling)
2x BenQ DVD DL RW Drives

Was looking at the following:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227210 (OCZ)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134039 (Kingston HyperX)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231047 (G.Skill)

And others...
Anyways, looking at the good, the bad, and whatever else you guys might have. Open to any suggestions on improvements, tweaking, modification, possible overclocking potential, and anything else. This will probobly be my last upgrade on the 939 Socket and, hopefully, it should last me another two years or three.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I have that exact OCZ ram. It works great and OC's easily. OCZ guarantees them up to 2.8v. ...and FEAR plays nicely on it.

 

[frankienyc123]

Going with 2gigs will definitly make your system riun more smoothly especially if your system is running out of memory and writing to disk when your playing a game. As for wether to go with value ram or high performance ram, I would go with the OCZ ram in the link you posted for $130, its among the best you can buy and opnly about $25 more then value ram. If your interested in overclocking you should definitly give it a shot. These Opterons usually overclock very well and 2.8+ isnt uncommon on stock voltages and air cooling. Before you start overclocking though theres a few utilities youll want to download, you want to be able to monitor your temps as well as test stability. A few good free program are, CPUZ, CoreTemp, Orthos, Superpi, ClockGen, SiSoft Sandra. For more info go check out the overclocking forum theres a sticky for Athlon64 overclocking thats gives you all the basics. Good luck

 

[double_helix]

Yeah I actually use CPUZ, CoreTemp, and other various tools to do some overclocking. Nothing heavy but nothing light: right in the middle. Right now, though, I think I'll remain w/ the stock specifications. I do, however, like the ability and idea that at any time I could overclock if needed...

Was also playing with the idea of DDR500s... but... that might be a different story on overclocking...

 

[ethel]

Assuming you've got 2 spare slots available, you do have another option - get another 2 512MB sticks. Would cost next to nothing with RAM prices these days.

Fast RAM is more important on an AMD setup than an Intel one, but it still doesn't make a huge difference in performance - you'd get much more from overclocking your Opteron.

 

[double_helix]

The issue is, assuming from what I've read, if I went with 4x512 DDR400 sticks they actually get downclocked to DDR333 when all four banks are filled.

Also the valueSELECT Corsair RAM was very cheap and was bought just to get my PC up and running when I made it 2 years ago... So, after much searching and digging around, figured I could further boost performace by trading my valueSELECT 2x512MB RAM for OCZ 2x1024MB.

One thing I have noticed, and I'll need to also research: I can overclock the processor easy by 200Mhz and it registers the overclock on BIOS, but once in windows CPUZ and Windows show the processor running at stock. Ran various other tools and shows stock, as if I never overclocked. Wondering if it has to do w/ the AMD Drivers for the processor...

 

[Hawkeye22]

One thing I have noticed, and I'll need to also research: I can overclock the processor easy by 200Mhz and it registers the overclock on BIOS, but once in windows CPUZ and Windows show the processor running at stock. Ran various other tools and shows stock, as if I never overclocked. Wondering if it has to do w/ the AMD Drivers for the processor...

Do you have C&Q running? If so, your CPU will drop it's speed during idle or low load. Also, do the OC'ing in the bios, not by using a util that came with the mobo or other 3rd party util.

 

[double_helix]

Nope, C&Q is definately OFF. Hated that thing with a passion! Yeah Yeah, all my overclocking is done in the BIOS once I find a stable configuration...

I'm almost positive its those drivers for the processor, gonna' uninstall 'em and revert to standard drivers instead of AMD specific...

 

[ethel]

The issue is, assuming from what I've read, if I went with 4x512 DDR400 sticks they actually get downclocked to DDR333 when all four banks are filled.

I've never heard of that happening - I am running 4x512 DDR400 myself, and it's running at 200MHz (i.e. DDR400). Maybe with some boards though - but it would suck!

One thing I have noticed, and I'll need to also research: I can overclock the processor easy by 200Mhz and it registers the overclock on BIOS, but once in windows CPUZ and Windows show the processor running at stock. Ran various other tools and shows stock, as if I never overclocked. Wondering if it has to do w/ the AMD Drivers for the processor...

No way are any Windows drivers doing that - I would definitely go by CPUZ's verdict. Are you sure the bios is not reverting to stock because it won't post? When you pushed the FSB up, did you put in a memory divider and bring the HT multiplier down?

 

[double_helix]

Its not windows drivers, its AMD drivers that we're talking about. Windows has a default drivers that do not have PowerNow! information. PowerNow! allows the system to automatically adjust the CPU speed, voltage and power combination that match the instantaneous user performance need. If I uninstall the AMD drivers for the Opteron 180 processor then it should revert back to windows defaults and allow the overclocking.

 

[Hawkeye22]

ethel, my mobo, MSI K8n Neo4 platinum reverts to ddr333 when all four slots are full - says so in the manual.

helix, the AMD drivers you speak of sound like the C&Q drivers - they bump the fsb multiplier down and drop voltages. If you disable C&Q on the mobo, it should ignore the drivers requests to throttle down.

If you know for sure that C&Q is disabled, then I'm not sure why CPU-Z and windows would report a different speed other than what's listed in the bios.

 

[ethel]

ethel, my mobo, MSI K8n Neo4 platinum reverts to ddr333 when all four slots are full - says so in the manual.

Blimey, that's a new one on me - that really sucks. I'm happy I have the mobo I do have then as I was recently able to do an incredibly cheap upgrade from 1GB to 2GB RAM.

 

[ethel]

Its not windows drivers, its AMD drivers that we're talking about. Windows has a default drivers that do not have PowerNow! information. PowerNow! allows the system to automatically adjust the CPU speed, voltage and power combination that match the instantaneous user performance need. If I uninstall the AMD drivers for the Opteron 180 processor then it should revert back to windows defaults and allow the overclocking.

I thought Power Now and Cool & Quiet were the same thing? If that's the case, then clearly you should uninstall them.