DDR2 800 or 1066? + Some System questions

[Iceorbz]

Alright so im thinking trying to 4 box, creating a new PC and the place im a little stuck I think is with the ram.

I coudl go with 8gb of DDR1066, or I could go with upwards of 16gb of DDR 800.. not really sure which would be much better. If I go with the 800, ill prolly just get 8gb and then buy two different sticks to fill my other slots. But im wondering if they will have a 4gb (1) stick of 1066 ram.

So what do you guys think would be a better investment for down the road.

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Edit
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Alright I think i went with the 1066 ram, I could mix speeds and do 2x ddr 800 8gb, and 2x 2gb of 1066 for 12gb of ram, maybe....
This is the computer I have pieced together so far
AMD Phenom 9950 2.5ghz Quad Core + Zalman CPU Cooler
BIO Star TFORCE TA790GX3 Motherboard
WD Velociraptor 150gb 3gb/s
8gb G-Skill DDR2 1066 Dual Channel
Saphire Radeon 4870 , 512mb GDDR5
Antec 900 Case w/ Antec 850w p/s
Windows vista Ultimate x64 ..

Im a little worried about the Video Card, im sure it could push 4 copies.. but Im going to be using maximzer and i really need nearly instanteous shifts of screens so Im not getting wtfpwned in pvp. I just purchased 3 acer 22" monitors, hope they perform well I want to run dualscreen off the same video card, as ive heard SLI doesnt really mater.

Wasnt sure if you can run crossfire w/o a motherboard being "crossfire" or "sli" ready, I was going to run dual video cards but im not sure. the Phenom had good reviews for a processor and I wanted to grab it, and so did the Radeon 4870.

So what about the windows vista ultimate? I was going to get XP 64 but i noticed a very large lack of support for that OS with drivers and stuff so I think i got scared.

[Threeofme]

1066 if your mother board can take it

[algol]

4-boxing will appreciate the 8GB, but probably never quite fill it. I can't speak as to its behavior with Wrath installed, but I doubt they would double the memory usage. Increased transfer rate OTOH might be nice with four clients trying to thrash it simultaneously whenever something needs loading.

Although with 16GB, there's an alternative path that opens up. The WoW data directory is currently about 8GB...and RAM drives trump the tar out of flash SSDs. But it's volatile memory, so you'd have to wait for it to reload all 8GB every time after you power down the machine.

[Iceorbz]

Hrm, didnt think of the ram drive idea. I don't reboot my pc's unless they crash and I turn them off every few days or so for a reboot. Maybe, that would be a good idea. i could do it with the 12gb of ram I think, but i wonder how big it will be when wow is loaded with the expansion.

[algol]

Looking at a WoW box, a BC box, and this, the published space requirements were 4GB, 10GB, and 15GB respectively. Expecting the data directory to grow to 13GB is not unrealistic - although I suppose we'll know for sure in a couple weeks. Also note that it will grow a little thanks to content patches etc, which this may or may not already allow for. I think it does, since my WoW+BC install directory reads out at 9.36GB.

Right now, it would be unwise to do with 12GB since that leaves you somewhere under 4GB to play with. With Wrath, it may be out-and-out impossible. Even 16GB may not be quite enough with Wrath, but we'll have to wait to find out for sure.

You can always just get 8GB of the 1066 and scratch the RAMdrive idea.

[jeffz0rz]

that video card will work fine. as you can see in my sig, I'm running a similar card (Gigabyte 4850) that I've overclocked a little bit, and I run 5 instances pretty damn smoothly. Around 50FPS in my main screen, and 20FPS on my slaves. I'm sure I could bump my slaves max FPS up a little to 25 or 20 and see little to no difference performance wise, but I think I'll up some of the graphics settings on my main screen instead, right now I'm running it pretty nerfed out. I can run Crysis on Maxed out settings, but I haven't tried it with AA on yet, thats my next test of this card with crysis.

So, based on that, and the fact that the system you listed above is FAR superior to what I'm running, you should have no problem at all running many many instances of WoW.

P.S.
SLI motherboards are NOT compatible with ATI Crossfire modes. If you wanna run Crossfire, you need a crossfire ready Mobo, if you wanna run SLI, you need an SLI ready board, they are not interchangeable. Not currently anyways, and I highly doubt it will happen any time soon. But so far I'm extremely pleased with my card, I just upgraded it from runnin an SLI setup, mind you, the nVidia cards I was running were nothing compared to the new one (x2 XFX GeForce 8600GT's XxX) you can be sure that you'll be satisfied with the 4870, and if your considering crossfire, pick up a crossfire ready board, and the worst case scenario is you upgrade to crossfire somewhere down the road.

I would suggest that if you can afford it, pick up the 1GB version of your card. but thats a minor suggestion, that should be able to handle most of anything you can throw at it right now.

[Iceorbz]

Oh man, I didn't even see the 1GB Version of the card, and funny its only like 60 bucks more, thats a done deal for that.
Changed out the board to
ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe AM2+/AM2 AMD 790FX
Which is 4x crossfire and at least two are x16 slots minimum.

Still trying to figure out, which copy of vista to run with ? Premium? ultimate? Basic ? I dont want to screw myself over with the windows domain stuff.

[algol]

Basic: 8GB max.
Premium: 16GB max.
Ultimate: 128GB max.

Brought to you by the "640K of memory should be enough for anybody" guys. Note, you need the 64-bit edition in each case, or you hit the "4GB altogether" cap first.

[jurence]

1066

I run 3box on this computer with 2gigs of Nvidia 1066, its lovely to say the least.

Oh and I have ventrilo, and a crap load of internet stuff in the backround with music streaming etc. The ram is almost never filled for me unless im in AV. The speed is the most important thing

[algol]

I was using 6.5+ on Vista, but am experimenting with XP currently. Note that Vista itself uses something like twice the memory that XP does. Some of that is for program preloading, and will be freed up if requested (although this introduces lag). Usually the first 512MB / 1GB goes to XP / Vista, or something like that.

Just the loading screens for 5 clients in XP hits 1.5GB, so...I wouldn't take that advice too seriously. It might be acceptable under XP for only 3 clients, but it will screw you over if you try that little RAM in Vista for 5.

But anyway...if you're getting 8GB, you should be fine with ANY version of Vista besides starter, and the stuff you were looking at already was the 1066.

Oh and BTW, I haven't had any driver issues on XP 64. Or Vista 64. There used to be plenty of issues, but mostly not anymore. Maybe if you're choosing really obscure and badly supported hardware?