Barely 12 hour after purchasing my motherboard, I have now purchased my RAM, two modules of pair-matched 1GB Corsair XMS2 PC6400, for a total of 2 gigs of memory. I know my motherboard supports up to PC2 9600, but for the budget I had for this rig, I just couldn’t spend any more money than this. I had the intention to buy the Dominator XMS3 sticks from Corsair, which are as we all know the best and probably most expensive sticks out there, but after seeing that an article from a French Hardware Magazine dating from December 2006 outfitted their “dream rig” with PC 5300, I lolled and decided that maybe 800 mhz RAM wasn’t that bad. Specially considering the awesome, kick ass timings: 5-5-5-15 out of the box, and 4-4-4-12 with EPP on a compatible motherboard (ie: the one I just bought) or with a little bit of overclocking.

This two GB kit is totally dual-channel compatible (of course), and besides just kick ass in general performance-wise, it also come with cool, black, Corsair branded heat-speaders that are…. yup you guess it, compatible with my color scheme.

All that remains to be bought now is the CPU and GPU… the two most expensive parts. I will probably end up buying my CPU and cooler next paycheck, and probably a hard drive too while I’m at it, and I’ll just borrow a GFX card from somebody that I know or rip the 16 meg PCI 1x card that is currently on LAGGBOXX and use that.

Next parts: CPU, cooler and hard drive.