Legit Reviews

Just recently bought an Intel Celeron E3300 + Biostar G41 M7 motherboard from Fry's for $40. It was just so cheap I thought it'd be nice to play around with. I'll probably be running this thing to the limits (or however high I can manage with the cheap mobo). Alas, I've ran out of spare DDR2 sticks so now, need to buy a new kit. Is there any sense in buying DDR2 1066 RAM? Or do you guys think DDR2 800 will be sufficient?

Thanks!

Here are some numbers from 2007 that were taken on a system with an Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 powered test system: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/511/1/

The motherboard being used is an ASUS P5K Deluxe, which used the Intel P35 chipset.

Thanks for the reply. Should have phrased the question a bit better. I'm not really after improving performance with the memory choice. I'm just concerned if DDR2 800 will be a bottleneck when it comes to overclocking. Have a Gigabyte P35-DS3R that allowed running FSB and memory asynchronously. However, I'm not sure if that's going to be possible with the el cheapo mobo.

really depends on the ICs then and how they play with voltages and higher clock speeds... when in doubt go with the kit that was speed binned 266Mhz higher.

Can you use a stick of ram from another system just to check for a bottleneck first?

The mobo may have the option for the 667 divider but my in my experience it isn't stable on cheaper boards.
Lower dividers' also lowers other subtimings and most cheap boards don't have the bios optimisations.

It's a tough decision as you can get upto ~4GHz out for that CPU and ~3.6GHz realistic for 24/7 use but this requires 300Mhz + FSB.
The board itself might not be able to do this as it's a G41 chipset leaving 800MHz+ RAM pointless.

If it was me and the price difference isn't much, I'd go with 1066Mhz ram but if it's ~$10 or more, stick with 800MHz.

Remember it's a budget build, don't get greedy ;)

Thanks. Will probably go with DDR2 1066 then. I actually have no use for this system. It was just so cheap I figured it might be fun to play with. Unfortunately, I can't really borrow RAM from the other PC's. Well, I could actually borrow RAM from the P182 build but the darned thing's too heavy and I don't really feel like wrestling with it at the moment. *sigh* I miss RAM prices from a year ago. Bought like 4 or 5 2x2GB kits back then for $35. Now, the same kit costs $100+.

Personally I don't think you'll see the speed advantage in any real world application other than WinRAR. My $0.02.

Major_A wrote:Personally I don't think you'll see the speed advantage in any real world application other than WinRAR. My $0.02.

Thanks for the tip. Again, not looking to beat any performance benchmarks. The CPU has a measly 1MB cache - I think that's going to limit performance more than anything else. Just concerned with ease of overclocking given I might not have the option to change FSB:RAM ratio.