Ram Recommendations for e4300 & 680i

[Nick_]

I just purchased an e4300 and an Asus Striker Extreme. I'm just getting back into building pc's again (haven't done any overclocking since using a pencil to adjust the mulitplier was common). Being that the e4300 has an 800 Mhz FSB, it's probably unnecessary to get RAM with a greater frequency than pc2-6400 offers. I do plan to bump the processor up later and would like to leave room for growth.

Questions:

Would it be worth purchasing memory that operates faster and underclocking until I have a faster processor?

In the above scenario, would using the memory divider hamper performance enough to nullify overclocking in the first place?

If you think higher clocked RAM is the way to go, how high? I see several products rated at pc2-9000+ even 10000 just around the corner.

If your thinking pc2-6400 what kits do you recommend. I was thinking along the lines of the TWIN2X2048-6400C3DF or maybe the OCZ PC2-6400 Flexlm Edition (being that I am water cooling).

Thoughts are greatly appreciated!

 

[-silencer-]

Considering CPUs with 1333MHz FSB are right around the corner, get as high of a speed as possible if you plan on upgrading in the future. 1333MHz FSB is DDR2-667 at stock speeds, and if you plan on overclocking a future 1333MHz CPU, you'll need to go for DDR2-1000 (or more) to get the same CPU GHz as the current E6700 with DDR2-800 with the same memory ratio.

Honestly, it doesn't seem to make sense to drop nearly $400 on a motherboard and buy a E4300 with the prospect of upgrading to a later CPU. The whole point of the E4300 is to be able to run cheap ram while overclocking.. and the E4300 will max out long before the Striker Extreme will.

If you plan on overclocking a future 1333MHz FSB CPU upgrade, at an absolute MINIMUM get DDR2-800.. preferably something DDR2-1000 or higher..

 

[Nick_]

Thanks for the insight silencer. The reason I went with the e4300 was to use it in a HTPC later. I saw the overclockability of the processor and thought it would be fun to play with for a while until I can build the HTPC. That will be a few months down the road after I get the ok from the wifey. HDTV comes first. I can't argue with her priorities there...

 

[jingles98]

i agree with silencer from what i've seen it seems to be a chipset limitation stopping the e6300 from clocking higher then 3.4 ghz on a p965 board. With the e4300 (lower fsb) and the striker, you should be able to overclock higher (presuming that cooling and voltage aren't a problem) say past 450mhz.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/11/core-2-duo-overtakes-core-2-extreme/