Tell me something about Geil, Kingmax and Kingston memory. I am looking at the match pair of 256k pc3200 Are there any difference? Is one better than the other quality wise?
Would I notice much difference in 2 and 3 Cas Latency?

I don't deal much with the other two, but in my opinion, Kingston is pretty good memory and usually compatible with most systems. What do you mean the match pair?..two sticks of 256MB each? If so, it is best to run two 256 sticks instead of one 512MB. 2 CAS is generally the lowest latency and if your memory supports it, you may notice a difference in performance (about 5% or so) and running a benchmark will definitely show you a performance gain in the memory department.

Go for the lowest latency rated Ram and make sure you are getting a lifetime warranty.

Good luck.

Sempron 2400+ OCed to 2.2GHZ
Abit NF7-S2
1 GB PC3200 Ram
Thermaltake T2-M4 HSF
rmackie@microtailors.com
www.microtailors.com

As of late Geil is a hot item on many retail sites and they are has good as Kingston at a lower price. Kingmax is ok. They are very affordable and you can get a pair of dual channel 512mb x 512mb for 95 bucks the CAS is 2.5 on it. But I don't know if they are good for higher overclocking which i'm going to doubt they are considering the price. I'd just go with a Geil or Kingston.

Kingston is a pretty popular brand, but I've never owned them. I just bought new memory, and was researching as much as I could on memory. I've never heard of kingmax until a couple of days ago...they're apparently one of the cheapest brands available, but at least for my mobo, kingmax made it on the qualified list.

I was going to go for Geil, but I didn't see them on the list. From what I have found, Geil requires alot of voltage (everyone has to run them at 2.8V or else they won't work). If you can't adjust voltages on your mobo, then this isn't an option.

(BTW, if you were curious, i went with OCZ. They're popular with overclockers now...it was really, really expensive, but worth it for me...I can overclock and still keep lower latencies.)

As for latency, you want the lowest latency possible. Lower latency usually means higher prices. On my old ram, I tried benchmarking with 2, 2.5, and 3 CAS...and the differences are a bit noticeable.

Newegg.com has ram available in both their refurbished and their clearance section. I was going to get the pc3200 kingston ram there, but decided to go with the ocz instead.

That isn't true about you needing to adjust your voltage on Geil RAM, because I have the Geil Ultra Series Value Dual Channel 184 Pin 1GB 512MBx2 DDR PC-3200 series and the Support Voltage is 2.55V-2.95V. Mine is running at 2.5V and I don't know who told you that you had to run them at 2.8V but they are dead wrong.

I will tell you how hot Geil is. When I orderd mine from newegg the next day they didn't have any geil ram of that kind for a month. As soon as I saw 5 star reviews on this type of ram and how happy people were with this ram that told me that this ram is pretty good ram. It was either this or the Kingston, but the Kingston model was more, didn't have a heat spreader and it was OEM. So I went with this one and so far it's been ptretty good. Athlough I would have liked to seen the CAS Latency down to 2 but for 110 dollars that wasn't expected.

Lower latency isn't all it's cracked up to be. Is there a difference? Yes, but it's minor. Is it worth paying a premium for CAS 2? NO. CAS 3 & CAS 2.5 are usually about the same price...go with CAS 2.5

The brands you memtioned are all from quailty manufacturer's. Kingmax has been around for many years! They're definitely not a new player.

Here's a short list of the top brand name RAM manufacturer's from Tom' Hardware...I would have no problem going with any of the brands mentioned.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/20030701/memory_tuning-08.html

Asus A7N8X-X
1800+ @ 8 x 210MHz
512MB PC3200
Asus Ti4800SE 128MB
WinME/WinXP Pro

I use kingston in both my laptop and desktop. Works nicely as far as I can tell.
1gig in the desktop 756 in the laptop.