Patriot Viper

My computer's been down for almost 3 months now, so I ordered an MSI K9A2 Platinum. The ram I have now is Patriot Viper 2 gig kit, that runs 2.3V and 800Mhz at 3-4-3-8 timings.

I was wondering, are lower timings better than higher frequencies? I noticed some DDR3 cards run at 1300+ Mhz, but are like 9-9-9-27 timings.

I haven't looked into the real differences between DDR2 and DDR3 other than speed, but all things equal I would take lower timings over a bit extra speed.

Unless the memory has more than twice the speed I wouldn't take ram with twice the timings. If that makes sense.

On top of that, DDR3 is out of my price range atm anyway. Between the two memories you have posted, I'd take the lower timing DDR2 over the 1300Mhz DDR3 with those timings. Eventually price will drop and timings will lower, but for now stick with the lower timing DDR2 imo.

Higher freq at low timings is preferable.

Each revision of DDR decreases the amount of power needed, but normally the first few generations of a new revision (aka DDR3) will have very loose timings before it will go down.

i have read that microsoft likes speed over timing so i let my timing go and went for speed only. though i only have ddr2 533. but i will be getting this some time soon.

http://canadacomputers.com/index.php...id=RAM.346.754