Memory question

[calarea]

I have an older motherboard that is capable of running on 3 Gigs of DDR Memory. When I research my motherboard online it tells me that when it was build it was written to use pc2100 Memory. My question is can I use pc2700 or pc3200 DDR Memory. Thanks for any help



Calarea

[Noircogi]

Yes, the faster memory is fine, but it will probably still run at the slower speed. The timings are set by the System BIOS ROM programming on your motherboard. For three-slot motherboards, you normally get best performance by using two matched-size sticks in slots 1 and 2 rather than using all three slots.

[calarea]

Thank Cogi for the insight. I know my computer stinks, we are just trying to get a few more months out of it. The motherboard is a MSI MS6547. Which slots are 1 and 2? The ones closest to the processor? Should I go for 2 1k sticks or would that be over kill for what I have? My Vidoe card is a GeForce 5500 OC 256. Since the release of TSS I have been laggy and just wanted a quick "inexpensive" fix.

Calarea

[Noircogi]

Here's the support page for the motherboard.
http://www.msicomputer.com/product/deta ... 5ultra.htm

If you already have at least 1GB of ram (and you're not multi-boxing) the memory is probably not the limiter.
The GF5500 has a lot of features, but not very high performance.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend investing in the 2G of RAM for that board since you're planning to upgrade soon. All newer systems use DDR2 memory DIMMs which are not compatible.

If you have less than 1G, I'd recommend 2 512M sticks of PC2700 or PC3200 (whichever is cheaper, check newegg.com for reasonable pricing beforehand).

To really improve things, you should get a new MB with DDR2 memory support, a PCI-Experess slot for graphics and a GF7600 or better. At present, I'd recommend an NF590-based system for AMD or the Asus NF650i board for Intel.

[calarea]

Cogi,
Thank you again for your help and guidance. I am thinking about purchasing these two memory sticks

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820211013

Calarea

[fazin]

Check into circuit city. they're having 80% off clearance sale. I am getting a 1gb ram stick for 18 bucks through circuit city. Make sure it's the kind you need though. I just got lucky. everything else on there is like 50 and up.

[calarea]

Fuzzy,

Online or in the store

[calarea]

Okay we put in http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820211013

At first the computer restarted itself over and over. Then it made it to the desk top several times and then restarted. The last two attempts i was able to surf the net for about 3-5 minutes until the computer restarted itself. While we were on the net we were able to play a video off of MSN's home page it seemed to work fine. When I tried EQ the computer shut down. There is this error box that comes up saying there was an error would you like to send it to Microsoft. We were able to go into my computer and it was reading 1 gig of memory.

We put the old memory stick in and I am gtg.

Did we buy the wrong memory?



Dazed and confused

[Noircogi]

There's a very small chance that the BIOS can't deal with the timings on the new memory.

Make sure the sockets are clean and the DIMMs fully-seated.

Try one DIMM at a time in each of the two sockets.

Try both DIMMs one at a time in the socket the old DIMM was in.

Depending on that, you can figure out what's up.

[fazin]

newegg said it's set at aggressive latency and the reviews said they have had to reset the bios/jumper (your mb don't look like it has jumpers anyway)

Try what Noircogi said.

My money is on BIOS though.

[Noircogi]

BTW: Here's the fully-working version of the support page (on the real MSI Taiwan website).

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/ ... php?UID=43

The latest BIOS update is back in October of '02, so it's not very fresh.

If you plug a single new DIMM into the slot the old DIMM was in and see the same instability, the best hope is that resetting CMOS (clears BIOS settings) followed by "Load Optimized Defaults" works.

According to the manual, the BIOS has the ability to override memory timings. See page 3-11.
Make sure it's set to "By SPD":Normal:2T to start. If that still doesn't work, use 2.5T:Safe:2T

If you don't have the 1.9 BIOS, you can try updating to that first also. None of the BIOS updates list any changes regarding memory support in the short change summaries provided, but that doesn't mean none are present.

The manual explicitly lists support for DDR333 (PC2700), but not DDR400 (PC3200).
Unless there is a BIOS or chipset bug, I've never seen a system which worked with 333 but not 400.

If none of this works, return the PC3200 and try some PC2700.

[fazin]

I saw that too noir but I never heard of a system that didn't work with DDR400 that supported DDR333.