Hi all

This is my first post here and I must say I am well impressed with the automatic search when you start a new topic. I still have a question though - I am buiding a shuttle PC (SK22G2V2) with an AM2 motherboard and Athlon 3600+ CPU (1.9GHz). I hastily bought a single stick of 1GB DDR2 533MHz memory but I am now wondering if I should have got the 800MHz instead (it seems Athlons actually benefit from faster RAM) especially since the price difference wasn't great.

I am not planning to overclock or run games but I do like having a responsive system. I want to see what Beryl is all about (I have a 256MB graphics card though not sure what speed) but apart from that it's just for broswing the internet, enhancing photos with the gimp and running openoffice. Does anyone think I would notice much difference if I had faster RAM? I'm not looking for blazing performance but it would be a shame if I was causing a bottleneck leading to the rest of the components not giving their 1f40 full potential.

Thanks for any opinions
Richard

Thanks Twintop

You got me thinking there with the dual channel thing and it does seem to make sense as the bandwidth is being increased by a bigger amount than going from 533 to 800 singly. It's something I hadn't really considered. Like you say, I probably need to try it.

I did find this though today which seems to suggest that the AMD chips are not bandwidth starved.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2762&p=5

I once doubled my memory amount on a windows system and didn't notice any difference. I can't remember how much I had but before the upgrade it was above the minimum specs (I have a feeling I went from 64 to 128MB on Windo 1f40 ws 2k). So it makes me wary of going over the top and spending money for no good reason.

Thanks again for your help.
Richard

Just to clarify, the processor is an Athlon 64x2 3600+ low energy 65W.

Cheers

DDR2 533MHz runs at 4.2 gbps while DDR2 800MHz runs at 6.4 gbps, or 52% faster. If you're going to be doing photo/video/audio editing, then you'll definately notice a difference. My suggestion would be buy a 1GB stick of DDR2 800 and try it out. If you don't notice a difference, then put the other 1GB stick of 533 in and have 2GB of RAM running at 533MHz.

The thing that makes a BIG difference is Dual Channel memory. It effectively doubles your throughput and doesn't cost much more than 'normal' RAM, but you have to get 2 sticks of it. I have 4GB DDR2 800 Dual Channel in my AM2 Dual Core Opteron system and even with Windows XP in a VirtualBox machine (with 1GB memory dedicated), I rarely if ever use my swap space.