A certain big box store has some 2gig sticks of pc5300-667 kingston valueram on sale for $34.99.
They also have some corsair 2g valueram for $30.00 online only, so after shipping its about the same price for 2 sticks.

So a couple of questions - since they are both valueram I am assuming they are pretty equivalent, am I right in thinking so? Both are listed as compatable with my motherboard.

Second; they should run in dual channel since my motherboard tries to run them that way (right now I've got 2 1g sticks of different brands and cpu-z says they are in dual channel), but if they don't run in dual channel would it still be better gaming performance to have 4g single channel or 2g dual channel? Like I said, my motherboard is suppossed to "force" dual channel, so it should run in dual.

Lastly - since I don't overclock or adjust timings and such, the valueram should be okay right? I realise that more expensive ram has better timings and latencies, but right now I'm using valueram and I don't notice any issues. Of course I've never had really good ram in this computer.

Thanks for any advice.

You didn't mention what your setup is.

Some motherboard/CPU combinations have issues running 4X1G with matched sticks, let alone mixed.

Actually it would be 2x2g sticks since I only have 2 dimm slots.

motherboard: http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_sp ... L&class=mb

cpu: amd64x2 4400
right now for ram I've got pc5300-667: 1g stick of supertalent, 1g stick of buffalo that came with the comp (and like I said cpu-z states that its running in dual channel).

P.S. - we'll just ignore the fact that vista32 won't even fully use the 4g of ram

Sorry, I missed the fact that you were looking at 2X2G sticks.

I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work, and you should see some benefit to the extra 1.5G you'll be able to use, as well as the fact that you will be running matched sticks instead of the unmatched set you currently have.

According to the corsair website the latency of the ram is 5-5-5-15 @ 1.8v. That doesn't seem too bad for valueram. Definitely seems worth $60 to get 4gig . I'm getting 2g sticks for about the same price as 1g sticks

yeah if you can settle with 667mhz ram. if yer not gonna over clock. yer good to go then
and if you are runnin vista x64 u can use all the ram. if u install xp or vista 32 bit, it will only pick up 3.1 gb of ram.