Hello all and thanks in advance for taking the time to read this. I'm building a second system for web browsing, word processing, cd burning... just basic stuff. Have: AMD Duron 1.1 GHZ / 200 FSB ECS K7S5a Motherboard / 200-266 FSB (supports SDRAM DDR or SDRAM) PC100 128 MB Ram The Ram was just lying around the house, as was the CPU (and a case, keyboard, mouse monitor, HD), so I just picked up a cheap mobo. A can of metallic gray Krylon certainly goes a long way on those old cream colored cases... If the CPU can operate at a bus speed of 200 MHZ, and I set the motherboard to operate at 200 MHZ, what effect will the PC100 ram have on performance? I think I'm confused here - does the PC100 operate at 100MHZ or 200MHZ? Since the motherboard takes DDR ram, I'm certainly willing to pick up some. If I picked up some PC2100 (266 MHZ) would it work with the motherboard and CPU bus speed (of 200MHZ)? What if I had PC2100 ram, set the motherboard bus speed to 266mhz, would the computer even turn on (because the cpu has a bus speed of 200mhz)? Thanks.... RON

The AMD 1.1G 200FSB should have the bus speed on the MoBo set at 100. The CPU Pumps the RAM bus twice to achive the 200FSB at the CPU. 2 X 100 = 200FSB Your Mutiplyer should be set at 11. 100 X 11 = 1.1Ghz.

Johns - Thanks for the reply. I set the Mobo's bus speed to 100 and I also set the CPU's bus speed to 100. I'd like to pick up some memory. I was looking at 256 MB of PC2100. I know PC2100 operates at a max speed of 266mhz and I'm operating at 200mhz. I just figured I'd go with it now, so if I upgraded my CPU in the future (to 266mhz) I'd be alright. And since it's around $25 on pricewatch, why not? I thought of going with PC100 256 MB, but it costs around the same and seems foolish for me to buy. Any thoughts? Thanks...

DDR is twice as fast as regular sdram so its a good move. Memory really has little impact on overall performance but we are getting to the point that sdram is slowing down the faster machines so ddr of any speed is the right choice.