The World of Warcraft beta has been coming ‘really soon’ for about two weeks now, so I decided to be proactive and get some more RAM for my aging PC beforehand. I knew if I didn’t that I’d be too addicted to stop playing, yet frustrated by the constant paging of memory to my hard drive.

I bought 1Gb of Corsair TwinX PC3200 CAS2, because Corsair has always been rock solid for me. Other brands have claimed to work at their specified rating, but have been flaky or flat-out refused to post unless I underclocked the chips. Forget about pushing it further!

I was previously running 512Mb of Kingmax PC2700 ram (at 266Mhz instead of the specified 300Mhz, see above), and the difference is very noticeable. 3DMark2001SE got a record result for me, even without overclocking my Ti4600 video card. I wanted to be sure everything was stable for the overclocked CPU and memory before I started tweaking the graphics card, but so far, so good. The CPU is at 2100Mhz (stock is somewhere around 1850Mhz), RAM is running at 400Mhz, 6-3-3-2.5, which is what it’s rated at. I’ll try pushing the RAM to 480Mhz, but I doubt it’ll be stable. If it is, great.

Oh, the DIMMs have ridiculous blinkenlights along the top of the oversized heatsinks, which as far as I can see serve no useful purpose whatsoever. My case doesn’t have a window, so they won’t distract me.

I realised after running some benchmarks that I don’t have any games installed on the PC anymore, and most of my CDs are still hidden amongst the junk from the move, so I didn’t play much to see how well it ran. I guess I can wait for WoW.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS