ram vs cooling

[water_cooler 20]

soon i will have the money to buy the 512mb muskin lvl 2 dual pack or a baker gpu and cpu block but i don't know which one to get can anyone give some advice
right now my RAM is a 256mb single stick of XMS nonLL PC3200 RAM

[skate2snow]

the heat is not so much bottering (look me im steal whit stock and i only have 48C at benching) so go for the RAM and after all go for cooling.

[Soulburner]

Depends, which one is your biggest bottleneck at the moment and which would benefeit you the most?

[lalPOOO]

Yea, its probably better to ask yourself whats holding you back. Obiviously cooling does matter, but if I were in the situation, I'd probably just go with the ram.

[skate2snow]

and its probably the RAM is blocking you. but if you have still some money after buy an good cheap temporary HS. (thats what i whould do)

[water_cooler 20]

if i were to get the ram i would build a custom evap
would extra ram and running in DC really give me a big preformance boost

[skate2snow]

more then you can think my friend have almost the same rig as mine exept the RAM and is performance is more then 15%-25%.

[afireinside]

extra ram is great for multitasking and gaming Also the mushkin is BH5 which means mad volts=mad speed and timings.

[water_cooler 20]

i'm not that good w/ the soldering iron i only vmod if i can do it w/ a smd graber and i don't think i can do the Vdimm mod to a 8rda+ with them
should i go w/ OCZ or Muskin

[skate2snow]

mushkin its not need that much volt

[Spec3]

Originally posted by water_cooler 20
if i were to get the ram i would build a custom evap
would extra ram and running in DC really give me a big preformance boost

Nope. Running dual channel on an nforce board is almost meaningless....unless you have onboard video. I would go with the Baker blocks

[water_cooler 20]

but would the boost from 256 to 512 give me better load times

[afireinside]

If your a gamer YES

[Cutthroat]

so if i diable the dual-channel on my
nf7-s it wont make a difference and i will be able to take my ram higher?

[skate2snow]

Originally posted by Cutthroat
so if i diable the dual-channel on my
nf7-s it wont make a difference and i will be able to take my ram higher?

No DC as not made for nothing and you have an higher OC when its enable

[st0nedpenguin]

Originally posted by skate2snow
No DC as not made for nothing and you have an higher OC when its enable

Or rather, DC tends to put more strain on your RAM/chipset, which in turn tends to reduce your overall FSB overclock a tad...

[skate2snow]

it was principaly made for FSB 800 coze 2x400DDR=800FSB

[st0nedpenguin]

Umm, not quite...

[texuspete00]

DC might not be too big a deal but 256 is really low. If you had 1 stick of 512 that would be one thing, I wouldnt buy a new stick for DC or more ram in that situation if money was tight. In some situations more ram can reduce an OC but if a page file is accessed in a game you can get a nasty random stutter at 5GHz and gpu clocks of 600/1000. Granted a 3dmark run and avg fps would be higher with more fsb.

When I went from 256 to 512 on my last system it was a great improvement. My new machine was pissing me of because it was new with occassional jerk in game. Seems it is happening again to me sometimes. I may be going 1GB.

[Craig]

Get the RAM first, without it a high end cooling set up is rather pointless.

[water_cooler 20]

ok so i will go w/ the ram upgrade than