I curretnly have 512mb of pc2100 DDR RAM. I want to upgrade to 3200, because I believe that is the best my board will upgrade (I have a Asus P4P800, it only supports up to 3200, right?), but I can't buy a whole gig of pc3200 with my $ right now. If I were to throw in the 3200 with the 2100, what effect would it have? What speed would it run at in my comp, I mean will it seem as if it is all 2100, 3200, or somewhere in between?
With PC RAM, you can only operate at the speed of the slowest DIMM. In other words, the chain is only as strong as its weakest link (and all that jazz). As for your motherboard in particular, check out the specs for yourself if you like, but I'll cut right to the chase: The max speed your RAM can operate at is 400MHz (assuming all RAM in your system can be clocked that fast). That being said, if I were you I'd add the faster RAM now and operate with 1GB ~ 266MHz until you can afford to replace the lot. Depending on your OS, there's much you can do to make [better] use of that extra memory that will improve overall performance more than the increase in clock speed alone can. Note: if you're running Win9x, be sure to limit your vcache settings to 32,768 (kilobytes). Otherwise, memory will leak like crazy and you'll run out of RAM faster than you would with 128MB in your system... :swt:
Speed: DDR400(PC3200) Type: 184 Pin DDR SDRAM Error Checking: Non-ECC Registered/Unbuffered: Unbuffered Cas Latency: 2.5 Support Voltage: 2.6V Bandwidth: 3.2GB/s Organization: 32M x 64 -Bit I was just looking at Newegg to see what RAM I could get and I came across all of this info, and I was wondering what some of these specs mean. I know that DDR400 is 400mhz, but what is the 3200, what does 3200 represent? Is the support voltage the amount that it requires to run? And what exactly does bandwidth have to do with RAM? Im sorry, just trying to learn
That's basically the bandwith you get from running it at the 400MHz speed, as in 3.2GBps. Motherboards have to provide certain voltages to various parts if the system is to function properly. Bandwith is how you define the speed and width of something like RAM or a bus (in computers). Like in a highway, the more lanes you have and the faster they go, the more traffic you can run on them.
