memory tips?

[nosaj]

hello all, im looking into building my first system myself and, with increasing research, am getting more confused (or more discouraged). Performance is obviously a concern but not at the expense of stability. Ive read that more than 2 DIMMs can be unstable and a review at toms hardware shows that some athlon64 motherboards fail to boot with corsair memory (which i though is of reputable quality)(http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20040112/index.html) although one of the same motherboards gets their highest vote in another test using the same memory (http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20031201/index.html).

I guess my main questions are what memory would you recommend for an athlon 64 3400+ and/or P4 3.2 that is good quality and "absolutely" stable. Will be doing a lot of encoding...guessing 1Gb will do. Is more than 2 memory modules a bad idea? Is DDR400 best performance-stability wise? how important are timings for performance/stability? (one review said something like their performance effects are minimal on modern systems so long as the timings arent super slow) any other essential rules of thumb?

i DID do some research before making this post to avoid making this a selfish cry for help but it can be troublesome extracting objective information from online sources (especially when the pages are cluttered with advertisements...often for the very products youre reading about!)

thanks for any insights, jason

[nosaj]

you can ignore the above post...anandtech.com seemed to be helpful in explaining a lot of what i wanted to know...but maybe i can still ask one question:

seems a lot of memory these days can either operate at 1) its rated speed which has better timings, or 2) faster speeds but slower timings. i was surprised to learn how common DDRAM is rated by the manufacturer to run faster than the processor/motherboard's stock setting. in reviews ive come across both scenarios are valued quite highly, even though benchmarks always seem to be faster with the RAM set to run faster. is the lower speed/faster timing valued so highly because overclocking does cause problems?

so much for my staunch anti-overclocking position, above

jason

[Solo]

If want to get yourself a pair of ultra-fast modules good for A64 and Intel at stock speeds get some of these beauties:
http://www.mushkin.com/epages/Mushkin.storefront/402288ea000e78de273fc0a801020635/Product/View/991156

For overclocking an A64 you need memory that will do 2-2-2 at a higher FSB. Winbond BH5 based memory was notoroius for being able to do this, however it has since been discontinued and is as hard to find now as a needle in a h/stack. Some places that might still have are here:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=27888

Some systems like 256 mb modules and dislike 512 mb modules. Some are more stable in single channel than dual. It all depends on the system. Best to do more homework on whatever your buy by visiting their user forums for best information.

For overclocking a Pentium you want high Mhz DDR466 - DDR533 depending on your target FSB. They use relaxed timings like CAS3 BUT when you are running at a high FSB on an Intel it produces an amazing amount of memory bandwidth.

Oh yes and stop relying on Toms Hardware for your info. He is sponsored by Intel and his reviews are totally biased. A lot of people do not take his stuff serious anymore ie the real world overclocking / hardware pro's. Rather check out a sight like LegitReviews.