Question about Ram amount vs. Overclock

[SocialChaos]

I have a P3 500 Katmai chip (slot 1) on an Abit BE-6 II motherboard, and have 3 dimm's on the board. I had two 64MB PC100 chips in it for the longest for a total of 128MB of PC100...recently picked up a 256MB PC133 chip and slapped it in, so now i have 384MB of memory running at 100Mhz (even though 256MB of it is PC133). I was wondering if i would get better performance running it like this, or taking the 128MB of PC100 out and overclocking the machine with the 256MB of PC133 in it. In other words, whats better performance, P3 500 with 384MB PC100, or P3 600 with 256 MB of PC133. Give me your ideas.

[paul233]

faster cpu and ram, although less ram overall, will run faster until you start using your virtual ram swap files. How about another 128 megs for 20 bucks and nothing to worry about?

[Hellmund]

Katmai's tend to hit a brick wall with air cooling around 600mhz. It's worth a try though. It really depends on what OS you have, something older like Win95/98 will give little to no performance gain going from 256mb - 384mb. You'd be much better off with 600/133mhz with 256mb but will your board take it? http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif