Memory

[Potatoman]

Probably obvious, but im running a 2.8Ghz P4 with 1Gb ram. The startup screen says the memory is clocked at 266Mhz. Would i notice a worthwhile difference if i installed 400Mhz (pc3200) RAM? Thanks.

[Mattk]

there would be improvements in certain areas but i doubt youd actually notice yourself.i did something similar last year when i upgraded my pc - i upgraded many components and more than doubled my ram,im sure it is quicker but i never really noticed !

[peanut]

same here, i also did that and noticed very little improvement. i then tripled my memory and then saw the difference. im not saying you need to triple it but the more the better. are you saying your machine can hold 1gb or it has 1 gb of ram. your ? is kind of confusing me.

[Potatoman]

i have two 512 sticks of ram

[OBonio]

I assume the MHz measurement of RAM is simply the bus speed of the motherboard (the speed at which the processor can access the RAM). Installing 400MHz RAM on a board that only supports a 266Mhz bus speed would yield zero difference in performance. The main bottlenecks on a PC are hard drive access times and bus speed. The more RAM you put in, the less Windows needs to access the hard drive for virtual memory, so that speeds it up though not necessarily that noticeably.

[mattie]

Check whether your motherboard will take pc3200 ram first.

[Potatoman]

The mobo will take 3200 fine