Question about Ram

[charlie476476]

I am going to upgrade to an AMD 955 black. I dont have any ideas about ram. What speed does it need. I have ddr2-5300(667mhz) in my old pc. I was wanting to know if those would work. Sales guy at frys was telling me i need ddr3 1333. Is there truth behind that or is he trying to make extra $$$?

[F9thRet]

What motherboard do you have Charlie?

Stephen

[charlie476476]

It was going to between these 2
Asus
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0322021
M4A785-M Socket AM3/AM2+/AM2 785G mATX Motherboard
Asus
M4A88T-M Socket AM3 880G mATX Motherboard
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0341012

But I dont have a clue which speed ram is needed. I am not going to overcloak. I would like to be able to use the 4 gigs I have but didnt know if there was a certain speed it really needed. What speed does it need to be?

[Sam DeathWalker]

On the 2nd of those the specs are:



Memory Speeds Supported
DDR3-1866 (O.C.), DDR3-1333, DDR3-1066

The amount of ram you have is more important then the speed


Although my computers are all AMD you would be way better off going with i7 (920).

Also thats not even a good choice for AMD, go to Nivida web site and find the MOTHERBOARD chips for "performance" then get your MB based on that. I have 2 780a and 4 590 boards from gigbyte.


http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/35382/LC_motherboard_AMD_Nov08_web.pdf

[charlie476476]

Yes I know about the 2nd being ddr3. That was only listed because i didnt know if I needed ddr3 or not. Wish i wasnt such a damn noob on some of this stuff. If I can use the ddr2-5300(667mhz) and I add another 4 gigs of it will there be any performance difference than using ddr3-1333mhz?

[Sam DeathWalker]

Your MB will determine if you can use ddr3 or ddr2. DDR3 is no doubt faster but again its not the speed of the ram that is important its how much of it we have as any ram is a ton faster then disk.

DDR2 will be slower then DDR3 but you will have better fps with say 8G of DDR2 vs. 4G of DDR3, for example.

DDR2 is fine, whatever performance difference there is, for wow, will be minor. Be carefull on priceing a lot of times the older slower stuff costs MORE then the newer stuff cause they are making tons of the new stuff and few or none of the old stuffs.