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Between the ASUS M2N motherboard and these two RAM sets, is there any real difference or compatibility issue that should make me go either way? (Since their only listed differences at Newegg are "cas latency," "timing" and voltage.)

EDIT: Oh, and this video card, if anyone could help. This 45W AMD CPU is on its way.

Go cheaper. There really shouldn't be any compatibility problems with any RAM, and its been pretty much concluded that all the fancy brand ram is pretty much the same as value except when overclocking, even by enthusiast sites (TR for example). RAM performance impact is negligible, especially compared to simply stuffing more of it in for the same price as some of the extreme brands.

That card is OK if you plan on using the PC for the usual desktop stuff (web, mail, media watching), and possibly light (or rather graphics-lite) gaming like strategy gaming, older games and so on. For current FPS's you'll already have to drop resolution/detail/etc to possibly painful levels. If you do like those games, you should drop a bit more money on at least a 8600.

Well, will those three differences lead to any compatibility issues? As the more expensive RAM has the customer choice award and price without rebate going for it. (Blew $55 on a webcam after the UPC went missing. )

P.S. Just had a compatibility problem with notebook RAM of my own -- maybe I didn't seat it properly, although I don't see how, but this morning HP Pavilion dv2120us wouldn't "read" either of the Kingston 1GB DDR2's I'd just opened.

Considering that my 7600GT would probably outperform that card, you may want to drop a little more dough for a better card. Anything under $100 really isn't worth it, anything over $250 is overkill. Best bang for buck cards usually come in around $120-$150. The only way that RAM and a mobo will be incompatible is if you get the entirely wrong type of RAM, and since everything you looked at is DDR2, there shouldn't be any problems.

Edward Yee wrote:Well, will those three differences lead to any compatibility issues? As the more expensive RAM has the customer choice award and price without rebate going for it. (Blew $55 on a webcam after the UPC went missing. )

P.S. Just had a compatibility problem with notebook RAM of my own -- maybe I didn't seat it properly, although I don't see how, but this morning HP Pavilion dv2120us wouldn't "read" either of the Kingston 1GB DDR2's I'd just opened.

You shouldn't have compatibility problems. I'm not willing to stick my neck out and claim that with 100% certainty, but theoretically you shouldn't have problems.

Eerily, I've also been having problems with notebook RAM recently. I've had my notebook in the shop for warranty repair of the hinge (don't buy a MSI 650/1039 laptop - they have a known defective hinge), and decided to upgrade the RAM while it was there. So in goes the additional gig. I come home, turn it on, blam, nothing works after bios. One memtest later (screen filled with errors on first test) and its clear I have a bad stick. So it goes in for warranty replacement. As soon as I get the new stick, I turn it on with memetest and let it run with good hopes this time, but no, it also fails in one of the subsequent tests. So that one was also returned. They just called me today to confirm my test results on their side (the replacement RAM is indeed busted) and told me to come in tomorrow or on Monday to discuss replacement or reimbursement.

Long story short, bad RAM doesn't necessarily indicate compatibility problems. It could simply be DOA RAM.

Thanks for the advisement on the video card -- this isn't a Crysis machine or anything, mind you, but I doubt I can afford an around-$100 video card.

As for the RAM... HP online tech claimed that they had not tested my RAM even though the essential #'s are identical to the OEM RAM (DDR2 PC2-5300, 667 MHz), and instead suggested I buy the OEM 1 GB "module" for $100 a pop instead of the $30 - $15 mail-in rebate (per chip) deal I got. Don't know what my options are beyond this, though...

Is the price before rebate of the RAM a plus, or...?

Thanks for the video card advice, I am now reconsidering my choice.

P.S. Any idea whether this motherboard choice will be compatible with quad-core?
P.P.S. Fortunately my RAM problem just got solved -- it was an error with seating the RAM, which now correctly registers as 2048 MB in the setup menu (aka 1.93 in Control Panel->System Properties).

Your decision, I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough about US rebate deals to comment.

As far as quad compatibility - it should work physically (with somewhat poorer performance then AM3 boards), however I have no idea if the BIOS will support it (or will support it in the future). You should be cautious though - AMD's quad core solution is becoming a minor disaster and a dud - performance-wise its rather poor compared to Intel's and even AMD's own high-end dual cores (excepting perfectly parallelisable programs), plus it has a bug which necessitated a fix which cut a further 10-20% performance of it to regain the, expected these days, perfect stability. In a year or two it might turn into something worthwhile and it will be there for you as an CPU-only upgrade path, however at this moment its better to stick to a 2 core solution for AMD.