What Should I Look For Or Get For The Sale

[mikenmike0001]

well, let's see, i'm kinda new to looking at specs and making comparisons........my last motherboard seemed to have fried on me, cuz i was loading up win 2000 and then all of a sudden i hear these popping noises, and the windows just shuts off, but th epower is on......

so i smell smoke, and the next day i open it up and i find three of those black boxed shaped things on the motherboard...i guess transistors......had a hold in the middle.......so with that in mind, i looked up on frys sales and i bought a amd 2700+ motherboard that comes with a 333mhz cpu...for 99 bucks!! woo hoo....or at least, that sounded good.....i jus ttalked to a friend about that and he told me there's supposedly two versions of them, a burton and a througough bred, and unfornately i found out from the receipt that it was thorough bred, whihc is a slower version......but oh well....

see, that's the problem, i dont' knwo how to look for good or bad specs....

that's why i'm holdin off until 4th of july comes up to by more memory, but the problem is that when i see memory advertised with it's specs, i dont' knwo what details of the specs are good or bad.....i usually go by sale pricing.....

can someone help me out?

[razorsharp013]

Are you going to stick with that motherboard, of are you going to bring it back for a better one?

And in order to tell you what memory you need to get, you will need to know what kind is compatible with your board...that should be listed with the product specs...so find that out. For example the board I am about to buy uses:

DDR 400 PC3200/PC2700/PC2100/PC1600 non-ECC DDR RAM Memory

Oh, and an excellent guide on RAM can be found here.

[clocker]

Mike,
The only difference between a Barton and T-bred core is the size of the L2 cache ( 512 v. 256).

I have a 2600 T-bred and I can't say that it's slow.
You probably couldn't tell the difference, either.

[tesco]

Tell us what motherboard you have now, along with how much ram u have and what slots are filled with what amount.

[mikenmike0001]

okay okay....i haven't opened the box yet cuz i'm waiting to see if there's going to be any special sales during the 4th of july weekend...

so let's see

it says...

"

ECS ELITE GROUP

N2U400-A
Form Factor :ATX
Chipset : NVIDIA nFORCE2 SPP
VGA/Audio:No/Yes
Modem/LAN:No/Yes
DIMM/DDR:0/3
ISA/PCI/AGP/CNR:0/5/1/0


K7 FSB 400
Dual Channel
DDR 400
6 CH Audio
USB2.0
AGP 8X
Color Map
Over Clocking
ATA 133

"

and on the receipt it says

"

AXP 2700 Bare/N2U400-A
ECS N2U400=1 Mainboard
AXDA2700DKV3D Thoroughbr D1 T
ATHLON 333 MHz FSB [2167]
AMD Bare CPU 1 YR Warranty
TH-BRED 256K L2 CACHE

nForce2Ultra400 w/ ScktA

1(8x)AGP;5PCI:3DIMMs for
DualDDR400:LAN;6Ch snd

total 108.24

"

WOW ... all those things i have no idea what they mean.......the terms and all...damn.....

[tesco]

Ok, for ram go with either pc2700 memory (two sticks) or pc3200 memory (two sticks).
(two sticks so that you can use dual channel. Clocker says it makes no speed difference (noticably) but it's still worth it to have imo)...now to choose between pc2700 and pc3200, decide if you want to OC (overclock) or not. pc3200 is better for OCing, pc2700 not as great.

[mikenmike0001]

i don't know how or what overclocking is.....is that like tweaking out your performance to the max? will that damage anything?

what do you mean by two sticks?

oh and also, with sales and prices these days, do you think it's worth it (affordably) to buy a single gig memory or just stick with 512 memory?

[razorsharp013]

Overclocking is simply making your CPU run at faster speeds than recommended by the manufacturer. So yes, it is tweaking out your performance to the max so to speak. It can be dangerous if you over do it without sufficent cooling, as you could fry the chip.

Memory actually looks like a stick, a circuit board that's about the size of a really big piece of gum.

And a single stick of 512 would be half as much a a whole gig. And something tells me that you would only need 512 anyway.

[clocker]

Originally posted by ROSSCO_2004@28 June 2004 - 15:08
Clocker says it makes no speed difference (noticably) but it's still worth it to have imo)...

That's not exactly what I said.
Apparently, due to the architecture of the nForce2 chipset, "dual channel" is not effectively implemented.
Placing my RAM in various DIMM slots did not result in appreciably better performance.
With a different board, who knows?

[tesco]

Originally posted by mikenmike0001@29 June 2004 - 02:51
i don't know how or what overclocking is.....is that like tweaking out your performance to the max? will that damage anything?

what do you mean by two sticks?

oh and also, with sales and prices these days, do you think it's worth it (affordably) to buy a single gig memory or just stick with 512 memory?

By a stick i mean a ram "module"...e peice of ram...whatever u want to call it, most call it a stick of ram.

you have a choice, if you want 1 gig of ram, to either buy a single stick of 1024mb(1gig) or to buy two stick of 512mb and they add together to make 1024mb. When you have two sticks, and put them in the right slots (says it in motherboard manual what slots) then you will be in dual channel mode.

Basically it is just supposed to be faster then single channel.

Before you overclock, make sure your temps are good. You can do this in the BIOS. If they are around 40 or under, then they are ok for overclocking. Then read the hardware guides for a guide (second post in there) on overclocking by peerzyboy.