Questions before buying... ??

[intokkabire]

Hey guys, i have some questions on some hardware im thinking of purchasing soon.
What are the benefits/negatives of buying a 1gig stick of ram versus 2x512mb sticks?
On a limited budget would it be better to buy a 3000+ (a64) with performance pc3200 ram, or buy a 3200+ with value/normal pc3200 ram?
As for the motherboard im leaning towards the MSI nforce3-250gb. Any issues i should know about it? Any other suggestions on boards to get?

Any other general things i should watch for?

Thanks for the input. Greatly appreciated.

 

[alent1234]

check the mobo compatibility chart on MSI's website to make sure that the RAM is compatible. AMD64 has an internal memory controller that is very picky about RAM.

 

[Shooters]

The downside to using only 1 stick of RAM is that you can't run dual channel should the motherboard chipset support it, which I don't think the nForce3 250 does anyway. Other than that there's really no difference, except maybe price.

If you're not planning on overclocking then go ahead and get the value/normal RAM.

Sorry, don't know anything about that board.

 

[wseyller]

Socket 754 cpu's don't have dual channel memory controllers in them, but the 940 and 939 cpu's do.

 

[SBGTF]

Please check out this thread as it has a good discussion of the board. At first its just an announcement about availability and ordering, then they get into some of the thoughts on the boards once they get them.