building my first amd/ati setup

[GhOsT1321]

faster ram. pure and simple

However, the RAM will be running single channel. You will lose the performance boost of dual channel.

You're one of the few people that I see wanting to do a AMD setup, everyone jumped on the bandwagon on how i5/i7's just stomp AMD's chips.

But for how cheap ram really is, you need to upgrade to dd3.

AMD is still the cheaper, better budget build. I have not seen a mention of DDR/DDR2 memory. There is no need to "upgrade" to DDR3, all suggestions have been for DDR3 RAM. Also, you can't upgrade from one RAM to another without a motherboard change.