Crucial memory... CL question
Quick question here:
I'm about to buy new memory for my comp, and per Crucial's website I have a lot of options. Motherboard is a Biostar M7NCD Ultra. Two sticks I'm looking at right now are the following:
512 DDR PC2700 CL=2.5 (~$93)
512 DDR PC3200 CL=3 (~$99)
The price is so close, I'm curious, which is better? Obviously the 3200 should be... but I've never learned all the details on how important the CL is on DDR RAM.
I'm about to buy new memory for my comp, and per Crucial's website I have a lot of options. Motherboard is a Biostar M7NCD Ultra. Two sticks I'm looking at right now are the following:
512 DDR PC2700 CL=2.5 (~$93)
512 DDR PC3200 CL=3 (~$99)
The price is so close, I'm curious, which is better? Obviously the 3200 should be... but I've never learned all the details on how important the CL is on DDR RAM.
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http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=20-145-026&DEPA=0
DDR400, CL 2.5, $80
This is Model#: VS512MB400 / Newegg Item#: N82E16820145026; do not confuse it with Model#: VS512MB400C3 / Newegg Item#: N82E16820145479, which is the same thing but with a CL of 3.0, which you don't want.
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-146-219&depa=0
DDR400, CL 2.5, $76
Both of those are as good as, if not better than, the Crucial stuff. In fact, I'd probably go with the Mushkin stuff for $76. I've got two sticks of that in my dual Xeon system, and it's great. At $76, you might even consider getting 2 sticks (unless you already have 512MB). 1GB of RAM is the ideal amount for XP IMO.
I'll check out the Mushkin. I have 3 slots to fill, so two sticks wouldn't hurt.
Crucial's good, but so is Mushkin.
Odd, but Crucial memory, in the UK, is exactly the same price as Corsair Value. Give or take a penny.
I used to buy a lot of Crucial, I choose Corsair Value now, when OC don't matter too much, of course.
The short answer is that you don't need to worry about it in your case.
The long answer is:
That's not quite true. What Crucial does is guarantee the compatibility of their RAM with your board/system.
This is useful in two cases:
1. When dealing with older laptops (ones that use SDRAM)
2. When dealing with very old (i440BX or older) desktop motherboards.
Older laptops can be EXTREMELY fickle about memory. If a stick of RAM doesn't have exactly the right memory density, exactly the right latency, etc., a lot of older laptops simply will not boot. Even newer laptops like this Dell 1.2GHz (?) Celeron notebook someone at work has- it worked with the memory from Crucial, but not the stick I bought from SVC.
Older desktops are the same way, but not quite as bad. Most i440-based motherboards I've used will use just about any SDRAM, as long as it's low density. The 440 chipsets (and I'm fairly sure this applies to chipsets of similar vintage from other manufacturers) are fairly easy to keep happy; they can't address high density SDRAM, but other than that, they're not fickle. EXCEPT in notebooks, in which case what I said above applies.
Anyhow, with DDR SDRAM, I've found that it's basically a non-issue, in both desktops and laptops. With the exception of workstation/server boards, which can require ECC/REG ram, just about any stick of DDR should work in just about any motherboard. I'm fairly sure DDR laptops are far less fickle as well, and I'm going to go test that now by pulling the RAM out of the Dell and putting it in the Sager and seeing what happens...
...or not. I left my toolbox at home.
Mushkin, Corsair, and Crucial are all decent ( I gave them in order of preference for an overclocker, Corsair is plenty good if you are not overclocking and do nto see extremely discounted NON-OEM Mushkin, and I have had Crucial match Corsair prices sometimes for me-- on the telephone, followed by a competitive price adjustment to the site price). I use Crucial for business boxes, Corsair for home boxes.
That said, here is trick you can use to get apples to apples pricing. Go into the memory recommender for Crcuial RAM. Click on the RAM stick model numbers. Note down if this is Cas Latency 2.5 or three, if it is buffered or not, and if it says Registered or ECC next to it also. If it gives numbers like 2.5,3,3,6 write those down. Then go to the Mushkin sellers and Corsair sellers sites and see what they have that compares to that info. I do this regularly, compare Crucial and ZipZoomFly and NewEgg for like spec RAM. Unless you are overclocking, Crucial can offer free shipping second day or other things from time to time that can reduce your total in-the-door cost to something approaching reasonableness once you learn shipping from other folks. I've also had them give me price discounts on more than one stick of same RAM stick ordered in one order before. And if they get overstocked on RAM, tehy ahve been known to have a limited time sale at ten percent off for web orders until stock is back at reasonable levels. Crucial DOES sell Micron Technology mfr'd sticks, BTW. MT literally owns them.
One other place to look, from time to time Monarch Computer in Georgia gets overstocked on Corsair or Mushkin (they sell some gamers boxes with Mushkin by choice in those) and has sales on them. I looked a few days ago and they had some 2700 and some 3200 sticks in stock on sale. Only if they have a sale going on what you want is this a real good priced site for RAM. http://www.monarchcomputer.com/ is site URL if you want to look and see what's on sale there now.
Corsair is generally the most preferred memory for overclocking applications.
It's a bit of a struggle for second place with Kingston HyperX/Mushkin Hi-Perf.
Third place is probably OCZ/TwinMOS.
And it drops off from there.
When it comes to registered modules for 940 Athlon FX computers, Corsair wins, hands down. When it comes to registered modules for a server, Crucial wins hands down.