RAM problem of my own...

[Doppelgofer]

right...my brother is a techy and says that hes fitted machines in the past with 3200 sticks of ram but he says anything over a gig and they've thrown a big strop at him so hes told me to get a 2700 gig stick of ram. i want to get a 3200 stick though generally because its higher spec

anyone had any problems? any advice in my direction will be greatly appreciated

[ryche]

My motherboard will only handle up to 2700 so maybe check that out first to be sure the highest it can go.

[avatar_58]

What motherboard brand and model do you have? If you have the manual that came with your mobo check that before ordering any ram....because its hit or miss if you don't make sure it works before hand.

[Ecmaster76]

PC3200 will work fine as PC2700 unless you are using a Mac or a Dell or something really pciky about the SPD matching the actual settings. PC3200 is generally of higher quality providing you buy a decent brand (you can get their budget lines). However just cause a stick can do PC3200 frequency doesn't mean it will be able to hit 2-2-2 timings at a slower speed setting

I am not exactly sure what "but he says anything over a gig and they've thrown a big strop at him" is supposed to mean, but perhaps you are speaking of problems with running at maximum DIMM population. I would need more info on chipset and CPU (and revision if its a Athlon 64) to be able to tell you what the best combo would be.

[Doppelgofer]

hmmmm i'm not too good with hardware....my mother board is a gigabyte GA-K8NS pro and my cpu is an amd 64 3000+. thats pretty much all i know

[Ecmaster76]

Yeah then you definitely want to use PC3200. Get some good ram too. You probably don't want to use more than two sticks at once though. Its a single channel model, so you may be able to run all three DIMMs at full speed, but I know on some dual channel configs that 4 sticks don't work as good.

So yeah, how much memory do you have now and how many sticks are you using?
How much do you want to have?
How much do you have to spend?

[DudeMiester]

If you have a newer CPU (Venice core) then you can use all 4 DIMMs without issue, otherwise you'd be best to just use two.

But with your mobo it means you don't have a 939 pin dual channel CPU, which means you don't have the newer revision, so you can use 1, 2 or 3 DIMMs without worrying. Personally I'd get some Crucial Ballistix 2x1GB dual channel kit.

More info here on 2x1GB:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=67762

If you can't afford that then just get one PC3200 1GB stick. When and if you upgrade to a dual channel CPU/mobo, you can just buy a second 1GB stick of the same brand/model for dual channel.

Also, your motherboard could support up to 6GB of RAM, so I dunno what your brother is talking about.

[Kevin Wolff]

PC3200 will work fine as PC2700 unless you are using a Mac or a Dell or something really pciky about the SPD matching


Compaq. http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/redface.gif *points at brother, then points at Wamplet http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/love.gif for providing the correct ram*

(Even futher off topic, PC2700-based Macs will actually take PC3200 ram.)

[Spyd]

Is good to buy faster memory (if is compatible), because usually the latency for fast memory running at low speed are better than the one that gives you the right speed memory.
You can inspect this in some good brand modules in their websites or in the packages. You can inspect this also using some programs (Everest (http://www.lavalys.com/products/download.php?pid=1&lang=en)) on the PC that has the memory installed.