[Anarchy101]

Would there be a huge performance inncrease in my games switching from an IDE hard drive to a Serial ATA or RAID hard drive? And would it be worth the money?

Also how much of a performance difference would there be between 2GB of DDR 333 and 2GB of DDR2 memory?

 

[CannonFodder]

Well as for RAID, you would need 2 drives to make that work. And I am told that it does make things faster. As for simply going from IDE to SATA the performance difference isn't really signaficant. There is a small gain, but not necessarily worth the money.

Going from ddr333 to ddr2 you should notice a significant jump in performance. You should, however, make sure you understand that will pretty much require a new MB. Unless your current MB has slots for ddr2 as well.

 

[Indoril Nerevar]

CannonFodder is correct - RAID will give you a bit of extra performance, but you'll need 2 drives. Going from ATA to SATA won't change much at all. I personally wouldn't bother with either one, because the performance you'll get will not be worth the money you'll spend.

Also, as CannonFodder said, check that your motherboard and CPU actually support DDR2, unless you're going to get a new motherboard and CPU. DDR and DDR2 are rarely supported on the same board, and AMD CPU's will only support one or the other, depending on the family.

 

[Anarchy101]

Well I know my motherboard doesn't support DDR2 but as for my processor it's an Athlon 64 FX 55. Does the Athlon 64 family of cpu's support DDR2?

 

[Indoril Nerevar]

It's actually dependent upon the socket. The FX 55 is a Socket 939, which only supports DDR. Socket AM2 CPU's support DDR2 (and not DDR). Anything under Socket 939 only supports DDR.