T1B

Kingston Technologies 1GB DDR2 SDRAM Desktop Memory

or

Kingston Technologies 1GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM Desktop Memory

The DDR2 is better. It can operate twice the speed of DDR on the external memory bus because it is supposed to be much more efficient. In other words, its faster at moving data to and from memory across the bus which is an improvement but you have to have a mobo that supports it I assume.

At the end of the day though, your slowest issue is still the Hard Drive. You could improve your speed either buy purchasing the fastest drives possible (15k RPM) or SSD drives and you might get some improvement by using raid, although tests show fairly minimal improvement over all. If your mostly reading from the disk for a game then you can definitely increase your speed depending on if you use Raid 1 (mirror), Raid 5 or Raid 15.

Hell its not even that expensive. You can pick up a 32Gb SSD drive for less then $200. You can load Windows XP or Vista on it along with your 2 or 3 most popular games. (10gb for windows, then 5gb/game) Then move your My documents and any data folder, including desktop and all the standard applications on a regular SATA drive. This way you will maximize the speed of windows and the system files, as well as the page file.

Considering that most 'gaming' machines still come with 7200 rpm drives, a system with an SSD drive, plenty of decent memory and a multi core CPU will fly.

Are those two memory sticks interchangeable in the same machine. I wouldn't think so. Why the comparison?

Actually as long as you have a MOBO that supports DDR2, it is backwards compatible. The only real issue I see is that if you have one stick that is a DDR and one that is a DDR2, they will both work at the DDR more then likely so if you are trying to upgrade a system with more memory, I'd take that into consideration and wouldn't spend extra money on DDR2 if you are using DDR in another slot.

ElTaco wrote:Actually as long as you have a MOBO that supports DDR2, it is backwards compatible.

Ummm...no.

I did have an ECS Pentium 4 mobo years ago that had two SD-RAM slots and two DDR-RAM slots, but there was a jumper to switch between one or the other.

DDR and DDR2 are completely different animals...voltages..etc...

Fair enough, I was wrong, had to go back and re-read what I read and realize that they are not meant to be backward compatible. In fact even the notch marks are different. My bad.