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Originally Posted by pest
Moderate gains at best IMO.
The xp2800 barton is only available in the 333fsb. So ignoring overclocking, ddr2700 is the best match, you will not realize any gains by getting faster ram than that. The motherboard is rated for 400fsb, but its bottlenecked by the cpu. Currently you are bottlenecked at your ram. It is running at the ddr 2100 speed or a front side bus (FSB) of 266. That is negating any advatage you have with the xp2800 (333fsb) and the fast (and nice) mobo (400fsb).
So by upping your ram speeds to a minimum of ddr2700, you will effctively be increasing your system fsb to 333 from 266. This will roughly equate to the difference between a xp2200 and an xp2500 333 - both run at a core freq. of 1800mhz with the fsb increase making the difference of the named speed. You might still wnat ot consider teh 3200 as I dont think its much more expensive than the ddr2700 if any at all.
BUT, (theres always a but) I am not sure how much difference the dual channel ddr will make and I cant be bothered to look it up right now. Maybe sloi can enlighten us on that or you could go search for benchmarks on tomhardware.com or somewhere similar. Just remember that (theoretically) ram that is twice as fast, still doesnt equate to a system that is twice as fast or twice the framerate. Its only part of the full picture.
I think this is all accurate as it is all off the top of my head, but feel free to point out any mistakes.
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w00t......finally..
the fastest thing you can do for your pc right now is to TAKE OUT THE 266 MHZ RAM! you sys will then be operating at 333MHz (yay). then you can choose to buy more ram or not, but get that shitty ram outta there. The only reason you would want 400MHz ram, is if you were going to overclock your shit, then you'll want the faster ram so you can increase your fsb on your processor. if you arent going to overclock, just stick w/ 2700(333MHz), but regardless if you are or arent, take out the 2100 ram, its slowing your sys down