I mainly using my system as an HTPC right now. I have a Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra motherboard and am running an AMD Athlon XP2200+ with 1GB(512X2)Mushkin PC2700. I was thinking about getting an XP3000+ and a 2GB dual channel pack of PC3200 Ram which would push my motherboard to it's max. I figured I could stick the Mushkin in another computer and the PC3200 will work with the AMD64 when I decided to upgrade. I guess my question is:

1.Will I notice much of a difference in performance? (I'm starting to notice some glitches when using Beyond Media/Beyond TV and when playing DVD's, which is primmarly what I'm using the system for. I can just tell it's taking the system a while to catch up with the programs)

2.Does it pay to upgrade both?

3.Is it one of those deals where I would probably notice as much of a diffence in upgrading one or the other making it more cost effective.(Soyo says the memory, even thought it's pc3200, will only run at pc2700 with my motherboard and a FSB of 333.)

4.Should I just wait and upgrade the whole shabang later?

Newegg has the stuff wicked cheap right now.

Well you already have enough RAM, any more and you will probably only see a minor improvement. So with the money you save not buying RAM you could upgrade to an Athlon 64 now instead of later. What graphics card do you have because that will have an impact on how DVDs play.

Matt

www.bbcomputing.co.uk

matt@bbcomputing.co.uk

I can't say anything about the mentioned
programs as I don't know them but glitches
at seeing DVD is not normal with that
system.
My old Asus P2B with a Pentium2 350MHz,
256MB SD Ram and a Nvidia TNT 16MB was able
to smoothly play a DVD video back then.
There have to be other reason for that.

Check how many processes you have running
in Widows and how much cpu usage you have
in idle mode. Unless you run a cpu cooling
software you shouldn't have much more than
10% usage while doing nothing but a few
background programs. The cpu cooling
programm will use everything left for
cooling which gets you up to 100%. Disable
it for checking if you have such one
running.

Otherwise I agree with tau_titan. It makes
absolutely no sense to buy PC3200 ram if
you can only run it at PC2700 speed and 1GB
should be enough!

Just to add...there's nothing to be gained by running your RAM at 166MHz/333DDR speed if your CPU is only running at 133MHz/266FSB. For best performance, they should both run at the same bus speed.

- Have you ever tested the RAM for errors using a program such as Memtest86 or DocMemory?

- Is your IDE configuration correct? That is, HDDs are not paired up on the same cable/channel, optical drives are not paired up on the same cable/channel? If you have a burner, is it on the 2ndary channel?

- Have you scanned for viruses, spyware, used MSCONFIG to disable unnecessary startup programs? Do you defrag regularly?

Asus A7N8X-X
1800+ @ 8.5 x 200MHz
768MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7
Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB
WinME/WinXP Pro

1.I have a ATI 8500 128MB running my HDTV off of the component adapter. I have the latest drivers.

2.No spyware or anything like that. I do defrag often. System overall is very clean.

3.Memeory has been tested and it's fine.

4.I have 2 hard drives running as a JBOD Raid on a the mother boards raid controler.

5.Plextor 16X dual layer DVD burner (Primary Channel 1), Older Hitachi DVD Rom (Secondary Channel 1), Lite-On CDRW drive (Primary Channel 2)

6.I just checked and with Beyond TV running i'm at 85% to 100% CPU usage and it's a memory pig....at idle with other background tasks running i'm at 2%. I'm guessing this is the system pig that's slowing things down.

But what can I do? Beyond Tv is always recording something off of TV for. I can't just shut it down when I wanna do something else. That defeats the whole point of having it.

Just don't start Beyond TV automatically at
system start. Only if you really want to
watch or record something.

Check the Beyond TV settings and looke if
there is a driver or software update!

HDTV is using a lot of resources so I guess
with it running it really takes a lot of
your system power.
I have a normal digital TV card in my older
system. It's a celeron 733@1100MHz and
while watching TV I can't do much else with
it so I guess with the much higher
resolution of HDTV you have similiar
problems.
That's the reason I use a second computer
for TV!