Do it. You can get some decent 128 MB chips for roughly 20 bucks. I just bought one from Office Depot for 24.99, with a 5 dollar mail-in rebate. It's simple to install, and the cpu recognizes the new chip ASAP. I can tell the difference in speed, the programs I use pop up much faster, as well as web pages. Being the cheapskate I am, it took me 4 months to finally lay down money for some more memory. I had a 1.0 GHZ Athlon AMD with 128 mb, now it's up to 256 mb. And boy, I can load everything much faster.
Thats a very good point. Also if you have spare slots in your board through 2 or 3 more in there. Or get a couple of 256mb chips (Circuit City has a 256 chip fpr 54.99-20.00 mail in) Unfortunatly my motherboard only has room for 2 dimms so i'm stuck at 512mb until the prices for the 512mb chips come down.
You can get high-quality Crucial (Micron) RAM using the promo page below : www.crucial.com/evguide They also have free 2nd day domestic shipping through 10/1/01. 256 MB PC133 SDRAM for $32.29 after the instant discount.
That's not a "deal". That's the usual Circuit City/Best Buy/CompUSA selling you RAM at more than you should have to pay for it, then having you wait 4-6 weeks for your rebate which you may never get, and all the while making you think you're making out like a bandit. It's probably Kingston ValueRam or PNY or some such memory at that. Get the CRUCIAL!!!
Hehe... I typed that knowing that's probably what you bought... To be honest, there's nothing wrong with Kingston or its ValueRam, unless you're thinking about overclocking your PC. At that point Kingston more than likely won't cut it. It's definitely a step down from the better Crucial, Mushkin, or Corsair RAM out there in that respect. But for every day use, it'd probably do just fine. I just hate paying more in retail stores more than anything when I can get free shipping and "technically" a better product by ordering online.
DoD-- I'm going to build me a new machine next month, and I'm going to go with a P4. Who would you recommend for Rambus memory, and do you have any deals for it?
As you can tell I havent been pricing Ram. Check out www.pricewatch.com its a cool site for finding low prices.
Dont go with the P4 they are overpriced and the rambus is more expensive. AMD recently slashed their prices too. The P4's will (note i said WILL) work better once people start writing software optimized for them. Which is still a couple of years down the line.
PUH leeeze. A couple years down the line the P4 will be obsolete. And sure Rambus is more expensive. It's like three times more expensive. It's also about six times faster. http://www.accessmicro.com/productinfo.php3?ProductId=MMPOERA2568N http://www.accessmicro.com/productinfo.php3?ProductId=MMPKI13256V
I don't really follow RAMBUS prices simply because I think an AMD Thunderbird or Duron with DDR memory can perform as good, if not better than a P4 with RAMBUS in most benchmarks. The other "pro" for AMD/DDR memory in all this is that DDR memory isn't much more expensive than your standard SDRAM. It's the fact that RAMBUS prices are ridiculously high that companies are coming out with chipsets that support standard SDRAM (or was that DDR, I forget) and the P4. Check out www.crucial.com as they also make/sell RAMBUS memory, too. By the way, I noticed your links to Access Micro. They sell a lot of Zeus chips. Zeus is considered 1 step above the lowest-end memory chips you can buy, but to be honest with you, they may work perfectly in your PC. I also never liked Access Micro's 15-day return policy (is that still in effect?). Hell, it takes 5 days just for me to get the blasted thing if they ship it ground...
CompUSA was giving free 128 MB SDRAM (24.99 - 24.99 rebate) a couple of weeks back. Any of you catch that offer? Also, I must agree that P4 is ridiculously overpriced. I built my computer about 2 weeks ago, after doing about 2 months worth of research. I suggest going with the AMD Thunderbird. Benchmarks indicate that it performs better than P4. I also suggest going with the DDR Ram because it is relatively cheap and better performing.
Hey DOD Read the thread would you please. You might be in the clique but I still posted that link before you.
Read up on some of the criticisms of RAMBUS before you spend the $$$. If you want to spend some money for performance, it would probably be better to buy a new dual Athlon board (only buy the new Athlon chips though).
DoD---crucial claims they don't deal with Rambus. Regardless, I'd like to think of myself as open-minded and informed, so I've been doing some research with the thoughts of "maybe" going with an athlon and DDR. I've never owned one, but if I find it too unstable, it's not like I've blown all my money on a motherboard and processor. Still, it scares me that I've read so much about AMD's unstableness in the past. It further scares me that the large PC makers are shelving their relationship with AMD. Most of all, when I read reviews on many of the so-called best AMD motherboards out there, I keep hearing people say how "stable" their motherboard is. It's like it's the one question the just HAVE to answer. Still, I'm willing to give it a try. So...what MB's do you guys recommend? My current Intel setup has an MSI motherboard that I've been relatively happy with. Prior to that, I had a shuttle, and prior to that.....hell....I can't remember. I've read good (and the occasional not-so-good) things about the usual favorites: ABIT and ASUS. I've also read some decent stuff about Soltek, gigabyte, and EPoX. I'm particularly interested in Asus A7V266, but I'd like to hear comments from you guys.
Wait about two (or so) weeks for the KT266A. It will be by far the best Athlon mobo out there (with the possible exception of the nforce). The KT266 is out right now but the 2nd edition is far far superior. For info check out: http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q3/010902/index.html
