[Bob-san]

Look at Pentium D 820... about $150ish and has 2 cores... overclock it to 3ghz and it'll be fine!

[Nix]

Remember, sometimes, it's not the Quantity of RAM but the QUALITY of RAM. Yes, a minimum is required, today at least 1GB. 2, and you're sitting pretty.  The speed of RAM does make a big impact on overall system performance  You don't have to buy the top-end muskin redline RAM to have a great gaming experience, I'm proof positive of that.  I bought Level 1 ram back when they had a much more convoluted naming scheme for thier ram.  Now they have three simple categories, the Green general purpose RAM, the blue high performance RAM, and the Redline extreme performance RAM. Most people can get away with the green performance, but the timings on the chips could be much better, which the blue ones provide in spades.  I'm just using them as an example, and I've used Kingston, Crucial, Viking and Mushkin brands and I like them all pretty well for thier specific uses.

As for RAID-0 I thought all of the drives had to be the same size, otherwise you'd be losing 40 GB to wasted, dead space because the array must be created amongst the same size of drives.  And no, you cannot partition a hard drive to get that 40 GB of space, because the RAID controller basically takes over those drives entirely. I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure this would be a waste of time.  I tried slinging my two 60GB drives together in a RAID array and it just wasn't worth the risk to lose all the data on those two drives.  I left them in standard IDE mode and they function just fine.  I never really saw a speed benefit with those two in RAID 0 myself, so I don't know if you would either. Also keep in mind that you would have to format all of those drives to get them into the array, because the controller will "format" the drives to be put into the array.  You'd have to lose everything just to get set up, and IMO, for home use, it's not worth the hassle.  I just partition the hell out of my drives.
 

[ZmaN]

no i already knew all that.

When i first got a hold of a RAID system, i didnt know of the space limitations.  after installing windows with a 120 and a 40 together, i realized it read 80 GBs and i paniced!  lol...

anyways..
I know the risk, and I don't care.  my PC is really suggish all the time.  I need speed, RAM and more hard drives are what I need, not a faster processor.

[Freespace Freak]

i have 2 x 256 sticks.  ill get 2 more 256 sticks and itll be 1 GB dual channel...

Im using IDE RAID 0 becaseu its onboard my mobo.  No extra costs, and I already have the drives.

Whats better?  RAID 0 or 0+1

Oh and, Has anyone ever heard of the company Magnetic Data Technologies?  Any expierence with their hard drives?

PC 2700 is old school.  By the way, two Ramsticks is not the same as dual channel RAM.  It's a new technology along the same lines as SLI.  In the past, having say, two ramsticks that together made 512 MB was the same performancewise as a single 512MB stick.  With dual channel that's all changed.  Two PC3200 aka 400 512's not only equal a single 1 GB 3200 in capacity, but are actually nearly twice as fast.  This is due to both the archetecture of today's CPU's as well as the motherboard.  To see if your mobo supports dual channel RAM, look at it.  You should have four RAM slots.  If they are dual channel capable, then two of them should be one color, and the other two should be another.  Mine are orange and yellow, and MSI's are purple for one dual channel pair and black for the other.  I can tell you right now that PC2700 would not be able to run dual channel.  The lowest they have that can do it are PC3200s like mine.  When you buy dual channel sticks, make sure they say that they're dual channel capable.  Also, they should have metallic heatspreaders.  Dual channel sticks generate a lot of heat, more so than your usual sticks, so heat spreaders are usually the kicker that they're dual channel capable.  I'd also bet that your mobo isn't dual channel.  You can't put two non-dual channel sticks on the same channel pair, otherwise you won't boot up.  The mobo will sense a problem and your comp will continuously reboot (I found this out the hard way).  So you have to put them on seperate channel pairs.

All in all, I'd suggest keeping your CPU.  Instead, I'd suggest upgrading your motherboard, possibly to an SLI capable one if you think you might use SLI in the future.  All SLI capable ones have dual channel RAM support, as well as most new non-SLI boards, anyway.  I'd bet your GPU is not PCI-E, so you may have to get a new GPU, but you can get a good one for cheap, anyway.  If you go for the SLI boards you'll need to upgrade your PSU to a 24 pin one.  Get a dual channel PC3200.  Mine is an OCZ, and my mobo's tech support guru (from DFI) recommended it.  Go to newegg or zipzoomfly to get the cost.  My recommendation would probably be more expensive than just upping your CPU, but I doubt you'd see any noticeable improvement in your systems performance just by upgrading your CPU.  Even if you upgraded it to a super-duper CoreDuo CPU.

[CP5670]

I know the risk, and I don't care.  my PC is really suggish all the time.  I need speed, RAM and more hard drives are what I need, not a faster processor.

Is there a particular program or something that runs too slowly? If general Windows performance feels sluggish, you may get a nice improvement by just optimizing Windows a bit, i.e. turning off some of the background crap and interface animations that are on by default. If games are slow, the video card is normally by far the dominant factor, but your memory bottleneck is quite large so that's probably worth eliminating first.

As others have said, the best upgrade you could make is to get either a 1GB or 2GB pair of 200mhz or higher memory. Beyond that, you would probably be looking at a more or less system wide upgrade to get a significant improvement in general. (you could also get a better video card but only if your current one is PCIE; it's not worth buying anything on AGP these days due to highly inflated prices)

Now there's a bit of misinformation going around in here...

And don't forget that you can run a game on its own core on a multi-core system, saving marginally on CPU time (Windows uses about 5-10% of CPU cycles, and context switching between processes and I/O latency accounts for a bit more). Count in things like your anti virus and other bits and bobs, and the performance improvement can be significant.

You can simply turn off all that stuff when you play a game. The Windows and driver background processes don't use much in the way of CPU cycles, only some amount of memory. I know from experience that a dual core does nothing for current games on a well optimized XP setup, aside from affinity problems in some old games.

The speed of RAM does make a big impact on overall system performance.

Well, it depends on what processor it's running on. On P4s the difference is quite significant (often 15% or more), on Core 2s it's less so but still notable and on A64s the memory speeds don't mean squat.

Two PC3200 aka 400 512's not only equal a single 1 GB 3200 in capacity, but are actually nearly twice as fast.

In theory, yes, but you won't get anywhere near double the improvement in anything outside of Sandra or Everest.

I can tell you right now that PC2700 would not be able to run dual channel.

uh, of course it can. In fact, the original B3 Opterons supported only PC2700.

All in all, I'd suggest keeping your CPU.  Instead, I'd suggest upgrading your motherboard, possibly to an SLI capable one if you think you might use SLI in the future.

There isn't much point in switching the motherboard only unless he's also getting a new processor and/or video card to go with it. His current board is 915 based and should support dual channel.

[Davros]

generally cpu spped is set by multiplyer x fsb
ie: my p4 3ghz  is 15multipyer x 200mhz fsb (you cannot change the multiplyer)
your p4 should be 14x200 = 2.8

edit: your p4 is 21x133 = 2.8

if you put in pc3200 200mhz it would run at 21x200 = 4.2 (and would melt)
as you cant change the multiplyer you would have to lower the fsb to 166 removing any advantage of faster ram
(apart from the fact you can overclock)

[ZmaN]

Yes My board supports Dual Channel.  Its in my mobo book.  I dont have money to do a ful upgrade, and I am NOT buying any more hard drives.  I realized its a waste to pour money into old technology, as I'll probably be building a new PC in 6 to 10 months from now after I pay my car insurance off.

PC2700 can run Dual channel, as long as all the sticks are the same speed.
I should probably just buy a dual channel kit.  I might sell all the RAM I have and buy a 1 GB PC3200 Kingston or Corsair Kit and install that.

All in all, Im not upgrading the processor, or the motherboard, or the ahrd drives.  Were back to strictly RAM.

Oh, and windows i think windows is running sluggish because I screw my last install up by installing some drivers and software before i installed SP2.  I think thats it.

ehh I need a fresh install anyways.

[ZmaN]

oh one more question.

If I end up building a new PC in the near future, is it worth it for me to invest in DDR RAM when I'll have to end up buying DDR2 RAM?

[Taristin]

I expect DDR2 will become the new standard, as more and more MoBo's are coming with that as their interface... I dont think I saw a single core 2 or AM2 MoBo that supported anything but DDR2...

[Descenterace]

DDR2 FTW definitely. I would hesitate to buy DDR, even the stuff that clocks at about the same speed as DDR2.