whats better? Ram capacity or speed?
 

whats better
1 gig of ram running at DDR400 (pc3200)
or 1.5 gigs of ram running at DDR266(pc2100)

Unless you need a hell of a lot of ram frequently (games don't need over 1G), then the 1G will be better. IF you're having to hit the swapfile it's going to be slower than real ram though, regardless of how fast your ram is. Swapping is about 1 million times slower than real RAM. ;)

Ram running at 200mhz (PC 3200) is way faster than 133mhz (PC 2100). Even if you have 512mb more of the PC 2100 the PC 3200 stuff is going to be better. Especially since about the only game that I play that even needs more than 512 is IL2 Forgotten Battles. The greatest WWII flight sim to date.

Because the choice is 1 or 1.5 GB, 1 GB is a better choice, because it'll allow you to do anything you need (unless you do really specialized things).

This would have been a difficult question if the choice was between 0.5 and 1.0 GB.

Unless you are video editing with any frequency, choose the faster 1 gig ram.

If you ONLY video edit, go for the 1.5.

Or you could do what I do, allocate a gig of ram out of your 1.5 gigs to be a ramdrive, put your 256 mb swapfile on it (since windows can't seem to live without one), and still have room left for your temp file directories and a CD image / favorite game install.

The system doesn't have to be "slow" if the ram is "slow". Any DDR is blazingly fast compared to accessing even the fastest hard drives, and does warp nine compared to a cdrom drive. I barely even notice load screens for games on a ramdisk.

That said, you'll thank yourself for spending more cash on the good ram. I bought good solid corsair 3200 sticks a long time ago, and they're still quite seaworthy. If it's a question of how much cash you have right now, I'd buy the nicer stuff and upgrade later, should you so desire.

Can't say I notice the difference with a ramdisk for games - a lot of the time if you have a lot of RAM everything is cached anyway.

check here and see what speed means.

http://www.ughq.com/modules.php?name...article&sid=24

unless you need more than 1GB RAM go or the faster stuff. But there is no point getting ddr400 unless your motherboard can support it or if you will get the speed benifit. I just use ddr333/pc27000. the real world speed difference isnt that high unless you read/write to the ram a lot. E.G. image/video editing

Buzz

wow. pc27000 *giggle* how much that cost you?
i benched the system with 2 gigs of ddr 266
and 1 gig of pc400 suprisingly the 2 gigs isn't THAT much slower, as my chips buss is a 266 bus

so i've ended uprunning 2gigs of ddr266 with 1gig setup as a RAM drive
btw
for all of you that can afford to do so
RAM driving games under 1gig install is the only way to go!