I changed from Corsair to Crucial Ballistix, wow, what a difference! 2 Gig dual channel pair DDR2 6400. Bought directly fron Crucial with free postage and less than £100.
Crucial is actually often more expensive than other people that stock Crucial parts. You can get some good 2GB PC6400 DDR2 like the OCZ SLI memory I reviewed recently for ~£80 that will do 3-3-3-9. That's a certain bargain, but it depends how long ago you purchased. What did you buy? What timings exactly? And what Corsair were you running?
currently using buffalo ram, but i just buy whatever is a good deal at the time i'm ordering. if i had to pick a favorite, it would probably be OCZ but only because their heatspreaders look the best
Usually just buy the best I can afford. I used to have 2x512mb of Corsair, until I replaced it with 2x1GB of Crucial. Even though one stick of Crucial died, it's just random bad luck, and the ram did a good job of hitting highspeeds with low latencies(4-4-4-12 @ 960Mhz stock volts).
I lean towards Kingston, but Corsair and Patriot are just about as good. I've seen more Corsair fail, so my vote goes to Kingston.
The RAM in this machine is 2X512MB of PNY value RAM. Bought from PC world. As above though, I just normally buy the best I can afford, just like with everything else. I'm not really one for brand loyalty. I respect companies that make consistently good products because they drive the market to innovate, but in the end, the best is the best, and brand loyalty isn't gonna keep me from getting my moneys worth. Same with PCs, same with guitars.
Mushkin are awesome, as are OCZ and quite a few others. Have to say though that I've had the very best luck from Mushkin
Corsair twin XMS2 timings as stock 5-5-5-12. This ABIT mobo uses an nVidia NF4 Ultra chipset and I've found these NForce chipsets seem to be fussy about memory types. I did try adjusting a few parameters, but it seemed to make things worse.An IT engineer suggested I tried Crucial memory finder as he found the matches always worked perfectly. (I was getting the occasional BSOD) So I went for it. not only is it completely stable it's also faster. I assume that's because the timings are a little faster at 4-4-4-12. If anyone knows an outlet that sells Crucial memory cheaper, (including the shipping) please let me know. The Corsair stuff was donated to the young lads I know to use in their rig. I'm not sure what mobo is in it, but they are very pleased and it's all working great! I've used patriot and Geil in my older rigs, and yeah they worked fine. I had terrible problems with an OCZ DDR 1 Gig pair a year or so ago and that put me right off. Around 6000 faults running Memtest over night. Obviously faulty, but it did work for a few weeks before it went mad. This was replaced with Patriot stuff and it's still working in the rig I sold months ago. I don't really think there is a "best" memory, I think best is what matches your mobo and what you want to use your rig for.
I've had good experiences with a lot of brands, Kingston, OCZ, Crucial, GSKill. Mainly I've just had such good luck with Corsair, I've been sticking with them.