Just recently I built an AMD64 939 socket system w/ 1 gig of PC3200(400Mhz) memory. I was looking forward to possibly overclocking and was wondering if I would need to up the ante and get some 533Mhz or 500Mhz memory. Would the 500Mhz (or 533Mhz) drop down to 400Mhz if I didn't overclock? What am I looking at?

If you did your homework and bought a pair of high quality PC3200 RAM then you should be fine.
If not then don't bother wasting more money on DDR500+. All you need is to set the divider so that the RAM runs slower than HTT(FSB). The performance loss you get with async is barely detectable even in benchmarks.

<font color=red><b>Life just gets better and better, first there was 9800SE->Pro, second 475Mhz on stock VGPU, third there's XT BIOS and now I've vVPU modded it! w00tz!</b></font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.maccrazy.net/9800" target="_new">http://www.maccrazy.net/9800</A>

Well I just needed some decent RAM... cheap... just enough to get me up and runnin' so I went with the cheapo Corsair VALUESelect 512x2 modules. Probobly not the best, I know, but like I said just to get up and runnin'.

What would be the best bet performace wise? I was looking at some XMS or OCZ Plat PC3200. Any recommendations?

Let me guess... you bought an ASUS motherboard right?

Unfortunatly there are no cheap good overclocking modules EXCEPT OCZ ValueVX which requires extreme voltage from the motherboard and is only avaliable on DFI boards.
Samsung TCCD based modules are soaring up in price because those chips are no longer made.

Oh, one last option I forgot to mention and that's the Crucial Ballistix PC3200.
My particular pair of Ballistix 512MB PC3200 is able to reach 252Mhz

So har much are you prepared to spend?
If I were you I'd just use the dividers.

<font color=red><b>Life just gets better and better, first there was 9800SE->Pro, second 475Mhz on stock VGPU, third there's XT BIOS and now I've vVPU modded it! w00tz!</b></font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.maccrazy.net/9800" target="_new">http://www.maccrazy.net/9800</A>

Hmmm interesting. Lucky guess. Yeah it's an ASUS board. As far as spending $$$$? So long as the two sticks don't run over $300 I'll dip into it. What's your opinion on OCZ? I heard the high end memory is actually pretty good. Same with Corsair XMS...

Please explain "the dividers". Overclocking is still seminew to me...

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by doublehelix on 06/02/05 01:33 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

Buying high quality memory modules aren't a matter of brand anymore, but rather which one gives you the lowest price for the same stuff since they'll all be using either Samsung TCCD chips or Winbond UTT CH-5/BH-5 chips.

The cheapest pair of Samsung TCCD based modules are from PDP Patriot. For 2x512MB it's <A HREF="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820220033&ATT=Memory+System+Memory&CMP=OTC-d3alt1me" target="_new">$198</A> from NewEgg.
Those modules will allow you to push up to ~270Mhz in general.
The best thing about those modules is that they only need 2.8V to operate at its best.

The alternative option is to use divider. In the BIOS you'll see you can specify your RAM to run at 200Mhz(DDR400) only without being affected by the HTT(FSB), that is what we overclocker likes to call them 'dividers'.

<font color=red><b>Life just gets better and better, first there was 9800SE->Pro, second 475Mhz on stock VGPU, third there's XT BIOS and now I've vVPU modded it! w00tz!</b></font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.maccrazy.net/9800" target="_new">http://www.maccrazy.net/9800</A>