My New RAM
 

Greetings All,
First my rig
2.6HT P4 and a motherboard that can support 800 front side bus speed. Dell, in their infinite wisdom, sent me a rig with 256MB of POS SDRAM. I just bought a gig (two sticks of 512) of Kingston 3200 with some of my tax money. My question is this do I keep the old POS memory in with the new kick-ass memory? I figure the more RAM the better. Thoughts, ideas, etc. Thanks

Re: My New RAM
 

my intuition says no, but i think it really depends on it being single/dual channel...

Re: My New RAM
 

SDRam and DDRam don't fit in the same slots. 3200 is a designation for DDR memory. One of those sets of memeory isn't compatiable.
DDR ram is 184 pins long
SD ram is 162 pins long

Unless you've mistated something, your out of luck.

Yep. You can't use both at once. If your computer does indeed use DDR RAM, then I'd take out the original RAM and put the PC3200 in. If it's really SD-RAM, then the PC3200 simply won't work in it.

-Lasereth

DDR is technically Double Date Rate SDRAM, I believe he just got the term mixed up. There are no Intel chipsets that I'm aware of that have an 800Mhz bus using PC133 RAM. It ain't gonna happen.

Mahler, you should remove the old RAM. The Intel 865/875 chipset will run at 400, 533, and 800 MHz. If the RAM that came with the system is a POS, then you're probably not running at full bus speed. As far as your system bus goes, you're limited by the lowest common denominator. So your spanking fast PC3200 will probably be stuck at a lowly PC2700.

Anyways, with a gig of RAM, another 256MB is not going to make a noticeable difference.

The RAM in a system will only run as fast as the rest of the RAM in your system, e.g. (if all the RAM is compatible with the motherboard) you have your SD and your 3200 RAM, the RAM will all run at the SD speed because the SD cant run at the 3200 speed.

Edit: Im sorry I can't explain it better, but I hope you understand what I mean.

Look for black and blue, Black slots for sdram, blue slots for ddr. also sd will have three terminal sections and ddr will only have two.
If your board has both sd and ddr ram bays, you can usually only use one or the other, but as stated above, your computer will not likely use anywhere near a gig of ram at any one point anyway.

You guys are totally missing the point.

He's got a Hyperthreaded P4. There is NO way he's using old PC133 SDRAM.

The old Intel 845 boards used PC133, but would not support an HT processor. The new 865/875 boards support HT processors, but not SDRAM.

And to top it off, I do believe the only boards that ever supported both SDRAM and DDR with slots for both was a SiS chipset for AMD Athlons.

I am so very glad I didnt know that...lol

Correct. there is no intel chipset that supports both, and even amd boards that supported both could only use one at a time. Attempting to use both on an amd board would fry it because they use different voltages. On a board with both SD and DDR memory slots, only one type of memory may be used at a given time. the board will not post as a saftey if it detects both types.
Mahlers board has one or the other. One of his sets of ram isn't usefull while the other is. I assume his board uses DDR and if that's the case, he should tuck the SD ram away in a bag and save it.

then maybe he has some poor ddr sdram, still, he won't regret his new ram,

i wonder if the Kingston 3200 is BH-5

alaways look for the bottleneck in the system and fix it, and remember, less, faster ram is better that more, slower ram. right now the bottleneck on my computer is me...