Tom-Guy

I have a 3.06 Ghz for $200 with $250 video card and free wrt54g jacking one of the neighbors wireless connections so I can fill my harddrives full of ****. The laptop I'm surfing on now is a 700 Mhz stepped down to 457 Mhz. It's running TinyXP rev3, right at 67 Mb worth of background processes and no bloat installed. It surfs the web about as fast as the higher end piece of machinery, and does a solid job playing movies.

If I wanted to play new games or dick around in Photoshop or CAD then you'd notice a difference. The big differences in processor performance and software are all aimed at the multimedia market, which a lot of us don't care a whole lot about.

absolutezroo

Figuring out what to buy is the difficult part. Putting it together is simple.

ju-on

They are identical sticks of RAM. I wanted 1GB of RAM, and these came as a pair of 512 sticks. I'll dig through my motherboard manual and have a look see about setting it up the other way. And about the ****, it's all on my old Hard Drive. I have yet to take the stuff off of my old HD and throw it on this one. Probably something for me to do tomorrow.

kamilk69

for dual channel ram, you need to buy ram thats actually paired, you cant just take two pieces of ram, they have to come in one package.

Tom-Guy

Bullshit. The RAM must be of the same size and clock speeds (down to RAS, CAS latencies, etc) aka "paired". Same packaging is where someone else does that for you, puts it in the same package, and then sells it for a few dollars more. The only thing you've successfully purchased, kamilk69, is a marketing campaign.

N1ghtM0nkey

I've gotten away with pairing up two different brands and latencies of memory before on a dual channel motherboard. Usually what will happen if the timings and latencies aren't the same is the motherboard will set both sticks of RAM to run at the speed of the slowest one.

A lot depends on the motherboard you have and how forgiving it is on what kind of memory you use.

Tom-Guy

Most won't go into dual channel at all, they just stay in single channel. In the future they probably will, but it's not a very standardized feature yet.

DrSeuss

JD is right, we use pretty much that exact set up in work (we build about 40 industrial pc's a month). It'll run dual channel, it should be in the bios set up.

Decent system for the price, but having seen what the core duo's do compared to the comparable (in price and spec) amd chip i'd buy the core duo. They're about 2x as fast, for any given clock speed.

P.S. anyone can build a pc.

E-b0la

HomemadePC FTW!

yeah def fix the ram for dual channel. you won't regret it.

oh yeah, newegg is the only way to go.