It's here....

[LavCat]

I had not been in the market for PC memory much in the past few years, and I had to educate myself. Anandtech is a site whose reviews I value, and they recommended Crucial, considering that this is for an Athlon system:

Our recommendations do not really change from our DDR400 2-2-2 roundup, but we do need to add Geil Ultra X to the highly recommended. Crucial Ballistix stills achieves the fastest timings we have seen across the bandwidth, but Geil Ultra X joins OCZ PC3200 Platinum Rev. 2 as a memory with the broadest bandwidth yet seen with any memory - particularly a memory rated at DDR400. Geil even surpasses the excellent OCZ Platinum Rev.2 by a few MHz at the top, but performance is close enough they should be considered basically equivalent, which is very high praise for Geil Ultra X.

The nice thing about the wealth of excellent choices in DDR400 2-2-2 memory is that the buyer finally gets to look at value in their DDR400 2-2-2 purchase. Since all of the DDR400 2-2-2 we recently tested goes to DDR500 you can shop for price among the seven available memories with assurance you will get the fastest DDR400 timings possible, with bandwidth to at least DDR500. If you want the widest bandwidth possible then you can choose between the Geil PC3200 Ultra X tested here and the equally excellent OCZ PC3200 Platinum Rev. 2.

In the more difficult area of memory for the Athlon 64, the Geil brings nothing new to the table. We found it behaved like Samsung memory tested in our roundup on the Athlon 64 platform, which means it tops out MUCH lower on the A64 than the Intel platform. Consider the A64 limit to be around DDR466 with this Geil Ultra X. That means for Athlon 64 systems, your best choices are still Crucial Ballistix or other Micron-based memory like OCZ 3500EB or 3700EB. The Micron-chip memory performs the same in our tests on either Intel or Athlon 64. If you prefer Samsung chips for your A64, then OCZ PC3200 Platinum Rev. 2 was the only Samsung dimm to reach DDR500, which was still far short of the DDR557 it reached on the Intel 875 platform.

Besides, I have some work-related connection to folks at Micron, so I at least have someplace to complain.

To shift the topic back to WoW, what is the best way to migrate the program to a new system? I could test Microsoft's plug and play by seeing if an image of the existing disc would work on the new motherboard. Something tells me that is not the cleanest solution.

What I want to avoid is having to redo two weeks of downloads if I have to reinstall. Any suggestions?


Edit: Spelling. Still looking for suggestions.