buying Athlon64 & NF3....a couple n00b questions

[haMz]

hi guys. at the moment im running Athlon 2700 XP+ on a gigabyte based board which has been good to me but think it's now time to move on. i want to get a Athlon64 3200+ and from what i have read, the UT NF3 board looks like a great one.

 

from what i have been reading on various spots on the web, some Athlon64 boards seem to be very picky about RAM.. either the boards wont POST at all with some brands of RAM (I noticed some ASUS boards did this) or using more than 1 stick of RAM seems to result in a performance drop (166 Mhz instead of 200 Mhz) . i am using a pair of 512 MB sticks (1 GB total) Geil Ultra Platinum PC4000 / DDR500 at the moment on my gigbyte board and they run superb.

 

1st Question: does / has anyone used these RAM sticks on the NF3 board without any issues at all? the last thing i want is to buy this board, hook it all up and find im stuck on 166 Mhz, that would suck

 

2nd question I only have a a 350W PSU, not a cheap crap one though, it's a Antec SmartBlue. is this going to be enough? now i dont have 10 or 15 hard disks in my computer. just 1 x 120 GB PATA / IDE drive. and my video card is a Radeon X800 Pro. i think to not cause any confusion. i 'll post my current specs here.

 

Athlon 2700 XP+,Gigiabyte GA-7N400Pro2, Antec SmartBlue 350W PSU, Radeon X800 Pro 256 MB, Seagate 120 GB PATA / IDE HDD.

 

any help soon would be greatly appreciated as i would like to order my new board and chip by the end of this week =)

[&#036SOLID&#036 Necro]

Hmm I have some Geil PC4000 in my Mobile 2500+ LPB..

 

I suppose I could swap it over to my Sempron 3100/DFI N-250 LP and tell ya what happens..gimme a little bit and I'll let you know!

[&#036SOLID&#036 Necro]

256MB Geil PC4400 CAS 3-4-4-4-16-16 (2t) @285FSBx8 (1to1) 2.9v

 

 

 

I just did a few quick tests, seems stable so far

 

Note: Did not like 1t settings very much at high FSB, I didn't play around with the settings very much to fine tune for it...I was getting 36sec Super Pi 1MB with Crucial Ballistix at 9x275 cas 3-4-4-4 (1t)

 

EDIT: This surprised me...300FSB 1to1, better than the Crucial Ballistix (Stops passing mem test 280ish) but only 256MB...

 

 

[Angry_Games]

1. you only run into this problem when using 3 DIMMs at once

 

2. should be enough if its a strong psu. I have an Enermax EG301P-VB 300w that makes a lot of new high end psu's look weak lol. Runs my NF3 overclocked with X800 Pro,. 2x raptor raid, cdrw, etc.

 

your mileage may vary of course.