Re: Mixing RAM

John Jordan wrote:
DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:
John Jordan wrote:

You don't say what kind of machine this is, so a lot of specific
advice is impossible.

XP SP2, ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard, Athlon XP 2400+, currently
using 1 GB DDR PC3200 RAM (not unbranded, but can't remember make).

nForce2 boards are often flaky with PC3200 because the chipset was
created before the JEDEC PC3200 spec. However, NF2 async performance
is horrible and the XP2400+ only has a 133MHz bus, so just put the
memory bus in sync mode and it'll be fine.


Do you do that via the BIOS?


IIRC this board has three DIMM slots - two on one channel, one on the
other. The controllers are independent and the bandwidth is
FSB-crippled so matching sticks don't make much difference.


Okay.


The nForce2 chipset doesn't support x4 chips and probably doesn't
support 1Gbit DRAMs (nVidia don't believe in releasing
specifications). Stick to 16-chip sticks and don't touch that "high
density" shit on eBay.


Right.


I was hoping to spend as little as possible just to give the system
a boost for a few months until I get a new motherboard/CPU and I'll
buy DDR2 or whatever kind of RAM is good value-for-money at the
time, so the 1 GB RAM I'm after wouldn't have to work for very long.
Do you think I'd get away with unbranded/generic for a few months?

You might get lucky and pick up a cheap 16-chip stick that doesn't
have any cell faults, but I'd say that's less than 50/50. Considering
that branded sticks only cost ~5 quid more atm, it's not worth the
risk.


There's generic 1 GB DDR PC3200 for £15 from microdirect (which is local for
me), but the first non-generic one is about £35.


Can't you just economise on usage for a bit? 1GB is usually enough
unless you're running Vista.


It's partly me being lazy and not closing applications or having too many
tabs open in Firefox etc, but I've been looking at the memory usage in
Windows Task Manager quite a bit lately because of the slow performance and
the combination of XP itself (don't know how much it consumes, but it seems
to consume quite a bit) plus the apps that start automatically when Windows
starts plus whatever I start myself frequently gets up to about 900 - 1000
MB, so I'd prefer to have a bit more headroom.


--
Steve - www.digitalradiotech.co.uk - Digital Radio News & Info

The adoption of DAB was the most incompetent technical
decision ever made in the history of UK broadcasting:
http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/dab/incompetent_adoption_of_dab.htm


.

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