This all depends on your processor and sytem bus speed. if your system has a maximum of 266Mhz (PC2100) fsb, then you will do yourself little good upgrading to higher frequency. A PC2700 memory card is designed to work on a 333Mhz fsb system, and PC3200 is designed for fsb speed of 400Mhz. It will do you little good to run 400Mhz memory in a system only capable of up to 266Mhz fsb.
Well, here's my deal.. right now i have 768mb of pc2100 in two slots (1 256mb, 1 512mb)leaving 1 open (3 slots total).. my board runs up to pc2700.. but im only looking to buy 2 more sticks of 512mb.. so i can either leave all 3 in there and have 1.25gb of pc2100 or 1gb of pc2700 and get rid of the 256mb chip leaving 1 open slot for future upgrade.. make sense? so i guess its really between 1.25gb of pc2100 and 1gb of pc2700.. does this make sense?
I assume that your board has a capacity of 2gb if not 3gb. In your present situation I would go ahead and make the upgrade to PC2700. This will utilize the fsb speed of your board and with that also make your processor perform better. Yes I think you will notice difference in speed based on the increase of frequency in fsb.
Check your mptherboards manual to see how many Gb your motherboard can handle and of which type and how many slots you can use with each type.
Most mobo's that will accept various types state that they have a limit of RAM and how many slots in total can be used for the max.
You may find that at PC2700, you can only use a maximum of 2 slots leaving the third redundant.
Just a thought for you to ponder on.....................
And another note, you can actually decrease the performance of your PC by having too much ram installed........thats true........
