Memory with NForce2

[goatcheese]

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/20021111/nforce2-16.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?

 

[knowan]

You'll get about a 5% bonus switching from cl2.5 to cl2, so no it isn't really worth it. Also, many chips rated at cl2.5 (and almost all brand name chips) can be safely overclocked to cl2. It worked for my Samsung 2.5 chips.

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Knowan likes you. Knowan is your friend. Knowan thinks you're great.

 

[goatcheese]

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?

 

[Crashman]

I've seen graphics benchmarks go up by as much as 5% by switching from Cas3 to Cas2. This is due to the caching of many small files to RAM.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[Flipphone]

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.

 

[goatcheese]

Wow... are you saying you can just buy that RAM and tell the BIOS that it is CL2 (even though it is 2.5), and it will just work fine? Or is there more to it (seems so simple!).

This also begs the question... what creates a faster computer:
CL2 DDR333 or CL3 DDR400
and how about
CL2.5 DDR333 or CL3 DDR400?