Firstly apologies for this thread not being solely on OC issues ......

I have just upgraded my mobo to a Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe to take advantage primarily of the x8 AGP, increased CPU capacity, USB2, SATA drive capability and dual channel DDR support (none of which were present on my last board!!!)

(I know this seems like a poor upgrade considering the the price of 64bit CPUs & Mobos available now but I don't have the money to buy a PCI-E card, 64bit CPU & Mobo all at once, plus I was able to get this board at a very low price)

I primarily use my PC for online gaming eg. Planetside , word processing and web browsing. My dilemma is now what upgrade next (probably for increasing FPS in games)

I did have my sights on some Corsair Twin Matched 2x512 pc3200 sticks (TWINX1024-3200XL , latency : 2-2-2-5) to make full use of my memory capabilities with the added appeal that I could use them later on a 64bit board (when I upgrade to 64bit). My current memory is generic 2x512 pc2100 (Infineon and Nanya brands) but fortunately my board seems to be able to use them in dual channel mode.

However I realise that the bottleneck in my system may be my graphics card which is a Sapphire Radeon 9600pro. Therefore should I be aiming my sights on 9800 card ?

Alternatively, should I be attempting to OC my XP2400+ (bearing in my mind I've never OC in my life before ). My board and the Nvidia software seems to cater for OC ......I think

I don't think any bottleneck would be my sound card as it is an Audigy2 ZS. My HD is a Maxtor 80GB 7200rpm ATA133 drive .....maybe upgrade to SATA ?

Any advice welcome

ps. my OS is XP pro and my PCMark04 score is 3131 and my 3dMark03 score is 3093

The bottleneck in your system is your 266FSB CPU along with your PC2100 RAM. Your board supports 400FSB - if you wanna get the most out of it, upgrade both the CPU & RAM.

About dual channel mode....this has been mentioned MANY times before, but there's little advantage to running RAM in dual channel on a Socket A system. The CPU's FSB is the limiting factor on the socket A.

Here's the CPU FSB, followed by the bandwidth at that bus speed, followed by the RAM required to balance the system:

266FSB = 2133 MB/s = PC2100

333FSB = 2666MB/s = PC2700

400FSB = 3200MB/s = PC3200

533FSB = 4266MB/s = PC2100 x 2 (dual channel)

800FSB = 6400MB/s = PC3200 x 2 (dual channel)

Dual channel mode is only "necessary" on Pentium 4 rigs running at either 533 or 800FSB, or on Athlon 64 rigs that support it. There's no harm running dual channel with the Socket A, but there's little or nothing to be gained by it either.

If you're gonna run your 2400+ at the default speed of 2000MHz (15 x 133MHz), PC2100 in single channel mode is all that's required.

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