Mid-Range Buyer's Guide, September 2005

Memory Recommendations

RAM prices have mostly stabilized after some major price cuts several months ago. In fact, on the DDR side, we're actually starting to see the budget parts increase in price. Whether this is due to manufacturing shifting to DDR2 production or other influences is difficult to say. It is now cheaper to get 2x512MB of DDR2 PC-4200 than it is to get 2x512MB of DDR PC-3200. For a good mid-range setup, 2x512MB minimum is absolutely required. There's no point in purchasing DIMMs that are smaller than 512MB in size, especially with some applications beginning to use even more than 1GB of RAM. RAM requirements are only going to increase in the future, and 512MB DIMMs will at least get you up to 2GB total memory when - not if - the need arises. (Of course, you might have a new system by the time 2GB becomes necessary, but that's a debate for another day.)

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Office DDR Recommendation: Corsair Value Select CL2.5 2x512MB
Price: $83 shipped (Retail)

You can check out our prices for 2x512MB of PC3200 DDR at our Pricing Engine. Any of the brands listed there are safe bets, though we've chosen Corsair CL2.5 RAM for our recommendation. (That was the cheapest CL2.5 RAM listed at the time of writing; a couple of other options are available with CL3.0 that cost a bit less, but that's cutting corners a bit too much.) This RAM runs with 2.5-3-3-8 timings, with the command rate working at 1T or 2T depending on the motherboard and other factors. The difference in performance between this budget RAM and what we're listing in our gaming setup is going to be negligible for office work. More importantly, we spent so much money on the X2 processor that we're balancing that expenditure by adjusting other selections.

If you want a bit more performance, or if you're interested in overclocking - though we'd caution against doing such on a "serious work" PC - upgrading to the RAM in our gaming setup is an option. For real multitasking use and professional applications, we'd recommend upgrading to a 2x1024MB RAM configuration instead. For value RAM, that starts at around $200 and goes up. You can get a list of several options from our Price Engine. In my own experience, the Patriot Extreme Performance works very well at the rated 2-3-2-5 1T timings, and on appropriate motherboards, I've managed to run it as high as DDR450 with 2.5-3-3-8 1T timings.

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Gaming DDR Recommendation: Patriot PC-3200 2x512MB Extreme Performance XBL
Price: $150 shipped (Retail)

For the Gaming DDR setup, we're grabbing the lowest priced DIMMs that use Samsung TCCD chips. In this case, it's the Patriot/PDP XBL RAM. There are other models that offer up to DDR533 speeds, but only with 3-4-4-8 latency. We like the RAM that can do 2-2-2-5-1T at DDR400, as it tends to be more flexible. I've personally used the Patriot XBL and OCZ Platinum Rev. 2, and for all intents and purposes, they perform the same. DDR560 with 2.85V ran stable at 2.5-3-3-8 1T timings, which allows for at least 2.52GHz from the Venice chip when overclocked. (Note that the choice of motherboard and chipset did have an impact on how fast the RAM would run, so you may or may not reach the same exact timings.)

Quite a few DIMMs with Winbond BH5 or CH5 are also available; for example, the OCZ VX and Mushkin Redline. Users who aren't afraid of pushing RAM voltages to 3.2V and above might prefer the lower latency at higher speeds offered by such RAM. We'd recommend that you add some active cooling (in other words, a fan) to the RAM if you're using 3.2V or higher, as it will start to generate quite a bit of heat. With a 3000+ chip and the maximum 9X multiplier, you'll probably end up using the DDR333 memory speed for overclocking if you use Winbond DIMMs. That's not terribly important, but it's worth noting that CH5 isn't likely to get reach the DDR578 speed that would be required to run 1:1 ratio with a 2.60GHz CPU.

$150 for 2x512MB of RAM isn't a terrible price, for high quality RAM. As we mentioned with the office setup, adding more RAM is a viable alternative. The 2x1024MB Patriot RAM mentioned earlier runs $230, or you could get the OCZ EL Platinum for $259 (with $25 MIR).

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Office DDR2 Recommendation: Corsair PC-4200 2x1024MB Value
Price: $163 shipped (Retail)

We've hinted that we had some plans for the dual core Pentium D, and here you can see the result. Since the processor is cheaper than the X2 (even considering motherboard costs), we had a bit of wiggle room. 2x512MB of RAM is sufficient for most people, so you can always go with that configuration if you desire. However, $163 for two 1024MB DIMMs that are still capable of 4-4-4 timings at DDR2-533 is too much to pass up. That's one of the benefits of DDR2: higher densities while still providing a lot of bandwidth. You can find DDR memory rated for PC-4000 at 3-2-2 timings, but the RAM will cost about twice as much as this DDR2.

Who really needs 2GB of RAM, though? A lot of the stuff that we talk about in regards to dual core systems - multitasking many applications, running several CPU intensive tasks at the same time, gaming while doing other work - can benefit from having more than 1GB of RAM. The only real problem is that Windows, by default, does some odd things with memory management. If you had 1500MB of programs and data loaded into RAM on a 2GB system, ideally you would never move any data to the page file, right? Unfortunately, Windows doesn't behave "ideally" and you might actually consider reducing the page file maximum size if you're sure you don't need more virtual memory. Benchmarks don't necessarily help in showing most of the benefits, but informal testing shows that exiting many games after they've been running for a long time is substantially faster with 2GB - near instantaneous rather than pausing for 30 seconds or more!

If you ever want to break the 32-bit memory barrier, you'll also need 1GB DIMMs, so this is a step in that direction. 8x512MB could get you to 4GB, but no desktop motherboards at present have 8 DIMM slots. You need to move up to workstation class for that, and dual sockets and CPUs as well. When will we actually need more than 2GB of RAM? Hopefully, not for several years for most people, but it's as inevitable as the shifts from 64MB to 128MB, 128MB to 256MB, etc., which have already occurred.

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Gaming DDR2 Recommendation: Corsair PC-5400 2x512MB XMS2 C4
Price: $137 shipped (Retail)

We assume that those looking at the Gaming DDR2 setup are going to at least consider overclocking, so we've moved from DDR2-533 to DDR2-667. If you drop back to a 1:1 ratio (rather than the 3:4 of DDR2-533), you could actually use the same RAM as the Office setup and move to 2GB instead, while still reaching at least 3.73GHz - assuming that the processor will handle that speed. We'd probably go that approach ourselves, so consider this more of a higher bandwidth alternative than an outright Gaming recommendation. Not many games currently use more than 1GB of RAM, but Battlefield 2 and FEAR (judging by the demo) are both breaking the 1GB barrier.

We've selected Corsair XMS2 C4 RAM for this option, which means you still get the lower CAS 4 Latency - most PC-5400 DDR2 runs at 5-5-5 latency rather than 4-4-4. Using the forced 14X CPU multiplier that's available on all the currently shipping 800FSB Pentium 4 chips (520 and above or 630 and above), you could run 1:1 ratio at up to 4.67 GHZ - basically, more than you can actually reach in practice without resorting to extreme cooling. Even going with the 3:4 ratio more commonly used (DDR2-533), you could still reach a 1000MHz FSB - 250MHz base bus speed. That would result in a 3500MHz CPU at the 14X multiplier, or 3750MHz using the standard 15X multiplier of the Pentium 630 chips.

Disclaimer: We've talked a lot about overclocking on this page. No, you don't need to do it, and no, the results suggested above are not guaranteed. The saying generally goes that if you need to ask how to overclock, you shouldn't do it.