2 gb cas3, or 1 gb better ram?

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regeisle

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I currently have a gig of ddr400 (no o/c) kingston valueram. I'm not doing any gaming or video editing, so really fast ram isn't AS important as for some others, but I do think I would benefit from some sort of an upgrade, and while ram is dirt cheap figured i'd do it now. I'm torn between a few options and am open to suggestions...

Option 1 - Add another gig of either corsair or kingston value ram, which both run at cas 3 i think.

Option 2 - Sell what I have for 40-50 bucks and get a fresh gig of higher quality / faster ram

Option 3 - Wait a few months, get a new mobo with DDR2 and get something even FASTER, once prices settle down some

On the topic, just saw that corsair's value ram is 2.5 cas. would that be a big difference over 3? if i added that in, would it just run at 3 like kingston, or would there be any "issues?"

FYI - where i'm running into problems is with large files in Illustrator and Photoshop, and checking resources I see that photoshop is very often eating up 3/4+ memory alone. Figured another gig would help out.

Any thoughts?

EDIT - OR, scratch the ram idea and spend the $ on a 10K rpm serial drive to run the graphisc apps off? does that speed up everything, or just opening/closing?
 
Personaly I would just add another 1 Gb of your current RAM module, DDR400 will do nicely for general apps. Currently DDR2 isn't really worth the price for its minimal performance increase [ personal opinion ].

If you were to add the Corsair @ 2.5 Cas, it would only run at 3 because the Kingston is not forward compatible whereas the Corsair RAM is backward compatible.

As for getting a 10K HDD, that will only speed your access times, not your overall performance once in the apps.
 
Cas latency has no effect on bandwidth. It could be cas 2 and you wouldn't notice any performance what-so-ever between that and 3. The cycle time of RAM also doesn't effect bandwidth. Only ras to cas and ras precharge have any effect on bandwidth and even then it's not a whole lot.

The fast high performance RAM is so expensive because you can generally OC them like monsters. G.Skill RAM is PC3200 stock 2-2-2-5 timings, but it can hit 275MHz+ with 2.5-3-3-7 timings if you know of course how to OC and get it up that high.

The 10K RPM drives will only help loading times.

really 1gb is more than enough for enough people and if you arent gaming or vide editing, then there's no point in wasting money in more RAM
 
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