Memory with NForce2

I'm considering building a midgrade system around the NForce2 platform. (AMD Athlon XP 2000+ or 2100+, probably no overclocking, or very minimal.)

I read on Tom's first review of NForce2 cards at
www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/200 [...] e2-16.html

that he strongly recommended CL2 memory. He even says "Only CL2". I didn't see any comparison graphs of CL2 benchmarks vs. other memory, however.

I've found that CL2 is 40-60% more expensive than non-CL2 memory. Given that NForce2 requires 2 DIMMs to take advantage of the dual channels, that cost winds up being even a little greater.

Is it really that important to have CL2 memory with a NForce2 motherboard? For the extra $100 or so that the CL2 memory will cost, I could buy a much faster processor (even a new Barton core). In other words, if the review took price of memory (vs. price of processor) into account, I wonder if they still would have recommended CL2 memory. The "bang for the buck" seems to side with slower memory and a faster processor. What do others think?

Thanks for the reply. When you say 5%, are you saying 5% bonus for RAM thruput, or 5% increase in overall system performance.

I kinda doubt the latter because to get 5% system performance improvement, the RAM and processor would have to be working about 30% faster, since the bottleneck is usually the hard drive (and the graphics card to a lesser extent).

Also, how much of a difference is it between cl2.5 and cl3?

Compusa sells pny optima ddr2700 2.5 and runs at 2.0 at a decent price and plus compusa is easy to return bad mem sets.