Thanks Nick, there are 2 sticks in then system (2 * 1GB).What product would you recommend for DDR3 memory? The link to what I have is at:http://www.crucial.com/search/searchresult...s=CT12864BA1067Thanks- Bruce.

Well thats better than one but the issue is still CAS and memspeedyou would need to step it up to Crucials better products but unfortunately right now all their better products suck for DDR3 http://www.crucial.com/store/listmodule/DDR3/~HS~/list.html2GB DDR3 PC3-16000

Thanks Nick, as always. I appreciate your help.Bruce.

If you had to take the lowest speed/CAS it would be one of these:http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList....52526967&name=62 things you must be careful of, .. make sure the layout of the motherboard has the clearance for the heatsinks between the memory slots and the video card.. some are very tight, and second.. make sure the motherboard has the voltage ability. There may be a cap on the DRAM VOLTAGE.. check the manual and confirm the board will tickle the sticks right

Thanks for the response and recommendations Nick, sorry for my delay, I'm not retired...... yet :)Does the X38 offer anything over the P35 besides PCIe 2.0? It seems that you need to go to the X48 at $400 to get the tRD and MCH voltage adjustment.All these discussions are tempting me to venture over to the dark side of hobbyist overclocking. However, I think I'll play it safe and just practice on a basic ASUS P5K and bet that the x48 boards will come down a $100 by the end of the year.It really seems like its a crap shoot that one will select all the parts for a computer and have them work well together. How does one go about determining what is the best ddr2 memory for this board if you don't know what frequency it will run best at? Do you buy the 800 DDR2 memory with the lowest CAS or the fastest memory with the lowest CAS and then underclock it?Ted

You raise some good points/questions Ted. If one does not have the money it would be best to wait on that type of purchase till the end of the year for several reasons. Sam's recommendations in that area are quite sound. Since there will be a major shift in technology right around September (expected), costs are going to drop. On top of that the memory companies will no longer be in a position to play games and I predict right around June/July we are going to start to see the DDR3 price war begin with a full swing war by the end of the summer.In that price per clock is going to become more reasonable.As for x38, PCIe 2.0 is not the only reason for a move to that platform or above.. a bit better FSB ability/stability is there as well. PCI2 2.0 is not just a gimmick. The standard does in fact increase the voltage to the card through the slot and therefore it does allow higher functions that will not work with less than PCIe 2.0. Cards are backwards compatible but that compatibility does come with a cost which is part of the fine print.At the same time if you do not have a need for a bit more stable clock, or, wish to run a more modern video adapter and will be waiting for such purchases, it really makes no sense to upgrade for those attributes. Again, I would wait and save so when the time comes the funds are there for a much better prospect for results.About memory selections, if one is not savvy with researching such things and finding out through Google and performance forums such as ExtremeSystems.org what memory product is delivering the numbers, your best bet is to always look for the lowest CAS rating with the highest memory speed. If one does not intend to overclock and wishes to maintain default specs, low CAS becomes the most critical value. A few rule of thumbs

"PCI2 2.0 is not just a gimmick. The standard does in fact increase the voltage to the card through the slot and therefore it does allow higher functions that will not work with less than PCIe 2.0. Cards are backwards compatible but that compatibility does come with a cost which is part of the fine print."I was going to put an 8800 GTS 512 in this system which I believe is a PCIe 2.0 card. Are these "higher functions" utilized by FSX or are you talking about future video cards and software that aren't available yet? Bottom line is, should I expect to notice any degradation of FSX performance from using this card on a PCIe 1.0 motherboard?Thanks for the recommendations. I will go probably go internet shopping for parts this weekend. Do you mind if I run them by you for your comments first Nick?Ted

With the 8000 Nvidia series (and 9000 which is nothing but re-vamped 8000 technology) no, no difference. With ATi 3870 and above, yes because their CrossfireX (2 card) and x2 format (single card) will not allow higher functions without the 2.0 standard. There are some older motherboards that will not boot correctly with those ATi cards, at all. At the same time it is still very new however the ATi 770 due out this summer (along with Nvidia's counter) will need that standard to start addressing the handoffs between the CPU/GPU which the newer platforms must have to accomplish.So if the decision for a hardware purchase is based on not upgrading that platform with newer video technology, and, you will upgrade the platform at the end of they year, 2.0 is not needed and for the 8-9000 series Nv products will not give you anything more at this point in time.Feel free to post a list and I will be happy to review itTypically, after I make a motherboard selection I will download the most current manual and any riders to that manual for review of the system and the BIOS. In that, I can find out things such as available BIOS settings, available voltage scales, etc, and also limits which may be placed on the memory slots in memory selections.

Nick, I have a question. I am trying out some OCZ DDR2-1000. I had assumed this would run 1:1 at 500mhz. The pair won't boot at over 440FSB 1:1. I am running it at max rated voltage. Is it reasonable to expect the FSB to operate at 500mHz, or is the mainboard limited to a much lower number inherently? So far, the best I have been able to get is timin of 5-5-5-18, ratio of 5:6 I believe, in any case, the DRAM freq was 1066 which seems good I guess, for this module. My latency scores went to 54.2 or something, from 59.2. Read rate went to 9200, up about 800. Tell me though, why won't the FSB run higher than this? Obviously there's some basic stuff I don't understand.Thanks in advance,Noel

Your probably hitting the wall on the cheap memory not the chipset. The X38 will do 500 but Noel, 500 is still tough for the x38 and requires high performance memory to do it, and, 500FSB is not going to get you anywhere. The max you want to run is 450-462.More than likely you are hitting a wall with those memory sticks. Also, raising the Northbridge voltage will also help stabilize for higher FSB.I assume you shut down the memory boost features in the BIOS as I mentioned. You don

OK, well, I think I had pretty much tried everything you have mentioned above. I did this over several hours last night. I was not sure about how far to up the NB volts, so I did go up only about 10% and that did nothing for allowing anything faster than 440. I tried other strap settings, other FSB:DRAM ratios, other FSB's and the latency and read rates I quote I believe are quite probably the best this cheaper memory can do. Why do they label this DDR2-1000 when it is not able to run at that speed, or is this a case of loosening timings to get there? CAS4 at 400 does not fly with this OCZ. It does with the Mushkin, but the best I could do with the Mushkin is an FSB of 405, so latency and read maxes at ~59.4ns/8300mb/s. It is not overclocking friendly, at least according to testimony and my findings. I think my lack of understanding was that these various ratings are meaningless, or are misrepresented. Again, why PC-8000 if it can't do it on a board designed to handle it? When I bought my QX, it of course performed as rated . . PLUS 40%. This is the complete opposite with this cryptic way of rating memory. Caveat emptor. Sounds like a naming scam.I really did play with all permutations, within reason. I believe 54.5ns or so is the best this will be able to do. Is this worth a couple hundred bucks, over 59.4ns on my current super cheap and stable modules? This part I'm really not sure. Perhaps I will install FSX this weekend and see if there is much of a difference if any. Here's what I was driving at some time ago: when we do memory read (haven't checked write) performance in Everest, I get ~9200MB/s with this OCZ, over ~8300 with the mushkin. Now, how often does this sort of read rate become a bottleneck? Do you have numbers that can quantify what the maximum MB/s demand the northbridge and FSB is being asked to accomodate, with a processor such as mine? This must be a known number. The picture you paint is that the high end processsor can feed this memory system more than it can accomodate. If that's indeed the case, then for certain, poor choice of components on my part to support it. At this juncture, the only truly convincing empirical evidence that has been posed is your screenshots. All the stuff about exactly what impact this will have in FSX is purely based on what the pictures show. To me, the difference in those screen captures looks to me to exceed 15 or 20% of the pixel density load involved, which is what one might be tempted to predict based on memory benchmarks, but only if the traffic exceeds the bus capacity. Anyway, I'll maybe get to testing and seeing if it's worth losing my 8GB of memory for this sort of improvement and report back.Thanks,Noel

Your trying to find the same thing my demo shows can not be found...A linear relationship between a value/performance/bottleneck does not exist. No, I do not have such values.The bottleneck is the wait states and the bandwidth of the memory Noel, period.Let me put it like this... why design DDR3 memory, increasing the bandwidth as time progresses well past DDR3 2000, and, run it on a 2.6-3.2GHz CPU if it had no value and such speeds would bottleneck the processor/FSB? Why shift technology from DDR2?If it was a gimmick I don

And one more thing Noel... remember I posted the STRAP should be considered the LATENCY on the Northbridge. In that the RATIO is VERY IMPORTANT to the formulas and represents another wait state optimized.If you can

>Based on 5-5-5-18 DDR2 1066 5:6 (which @ 440FSB 5:6 is DDR2>1056) here is where you sit with CALWI compared to me,>REGARDLESS of the EVEREST benchmark latency you are looking>atOy! So now Everest latency doesn't matter? I don't think I have the time to follow this argument!Listen Nick, I know what your saying makes sense, but truly I don't have the patience to try to fully understand it. Yes, wait states are what need to be reduced. Bandwidth with lower wait states is what matters. It's easy (just look at FSX) to design software that will tax any system, DDR3 or what have you. So the question has to be, is my old memory sub good enough? Seems like quite a few people have found acceptable performance for FSX, and don't know how they got there. I've posed this to you before, and never saw a response:If YOUR particular config of FSX is say 100%, then at what LOD, slider settings, autogen, etc, relative to that would allow my cluncky memory sub to display the same visual CLARITY, offset by reducing visual COMPLEXITY? I think this is a valid question. Certainly the demand on the memory sub is affected by how we set up FSX. If we could assign a value to the capacity of your rig to process the load, what value would we assign my system in terms of CPU/Memory sub? I'm back to values, but surely this IS a quantity that could be measured. Put another way, there should be a point at which WE can BOTH dial back complexity, and the displayed experience will be the same. If we put all sliders LEFT, 1024 x 768, our systems should be displaying the same result, or am I wrong in this assumption? If this is not the case, then there are issues I def do not comprehend. Where is the point at which the DDR3 system, same CPU, etc, begins to depart from the optimized DDR2 system?Let's say this argument is bogus. Is the solution for me to change mainboards & memory? If so, what are the best choices here? I think I may be able to offload my P5E & mush to my bro, who needs a new build. Money is no object, UNLESS the payoff is truly theoretical. From your screenshots, it isn't. But again, do respond to my argument above. This IS relavent to my personal decision on this. I can pick up DDR2-1200 at 5-5-5-12. I would have to go down to 2GB. That doesn't sound attractive for my particular PC needs. Layout the best match of mainboard/memory you can predict if you would . . . but most of all, respond to my argumet above if you would.It looks like the new ASUS Rampage X48 is DDR2. Why? Nobody understands how important DDR3 is yet, so we'll market this til they figure it out? I guess this is the answer in simple terms. Thank you kindly for your technical prowess and the sharing of it Nick, truly . . .Noel

OK, I will come back to this... you are still trying to place a linear value on FSX performance using my system as the target goal..Not possible and that is one of the major points in my demoIts not a linear result. You are mixing FSX tuning with system tuning, They are 2 different areas and the results are different based on several factors, including the add-ons installed.I will post back answers in detail Noel but right now I am in the middles of something else. I will try and have it posted later this evening.The Rampage Extreme, when released, will be DDR3If money is no object and you do not mind the fact that anything you purchase before Nellie will not run Nellie, I suggest you start looking at DDR3. And unfortunately 2x2GB (and higher) will always be slower than 2x1GB. Eventually that will change but right now running more than 2 in a performance environment is relatively new. You can get CAS7 2x2GB DDR3 1600 modules which right now is the best that can be purchased in 2x2GB.. with that, the performance gain comes with increasing their speed above DDR3 1600