I have an asus a8n mobo with two 512 sticks of geil value ram (the blue one). I'm thinking of purchasing the GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit since its on offer this week. If i place the new sticks in slot 1 and 3 and move the old sticks to 2 and 4 will that give me 3 decent gbs of ram or would i be better removing the old sticks completely?
Will this memory format be alright?
- Thread starter neomax
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The Ram is DDR2, your current Ram is DDR. It is not compatible so you would need to purchase DDR Ram which is more expensive.
Man of Honour
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If you need more Ram then you will have to buy DDR, socket 939 does not support DDR2. DDR2 is simply the current Ram standard and it has replaced DDR, there isn't any huge benefit other than in available bandwidth but it is now cheaper and widely used. You can also get DDR3 but at the moment it is prohibitively expensive and offers no real benefit so you might as well ignore it for the moment.
I wouldnt even bother with 3Gb of ram unless your going to install 64bit Windows XP or Vista.
Sure 32bit windows can use PAE to access 3GB, but it will still only assign a maximum of 2Gb to any single application (With the exception of Microsoft SQL server which has native PAE support). Thats a limit of 32bit windows. So unless your runing many programs at once, and using up all your ram, an extra gb wont do much. Even memory hungry applications like Photoshop are not compiled with PAE support, so can only use 2Gb ram. (Of course it does mean windows can allocate 2GB ram for photoshop for example, while the OS itself is using other parts of the memory... hence as I said its ok for heavy multi tasking)
That said, as you only have 1Gb of ram.. The move from 1Gb to 2Gb is very worthwhile. Im into MMORPG's and frequently my system is using around 1.5Gb of memory.
PS, DDR2 isnt even 'always' faster. AMD64, and P4 both prefer low latency to high bandwidth(As long as this isnt taken to extreme... IE even if the imposible was available (zero latency), if combined with extremely poor bandwidth overall performance would be bad. Its one of those balancing acts Having the highest bandwidth without sacrificing too much latency is often the way to the best performance machine. DDR memorys often have extremely tight memory timings (as fast as 2/2/2/5 is quite common on ddr). While DDR2's are more common at 5/5/5/15, although the latest DDR2's are getting better, 3/3/3/12 is pretty respectable
Sure 32bit windows can use PAE to access 3GB, but it will still only assign a maximum of 2Gb to any single application (With the exception of Microsoft SQL server which has native PAE support). Thats a limit of 32bit windows. So unless your runing many programs at once, and using up all your ram, an extra gb wont do much. Even memory hungry applications like Photoshop are not compiled with PAE support, so can only use 2Gb ram. (Of course it does mean windows can allocate 2GB ram for photoshop for example, while the OS itself is using other parts of the memory... hence as I said its ok for heavy multi tasking)
That said, as you only have 1Gb of ram.. The move from 1Gb to 2Gb is very worthwhile. Im into MMORPG's and frequently my system is using around 1.5Gb of memory.
PS, DDR2 isnt even 'always' faster. AMD64, and P4 both prefer low latency to high bandwidth(As long as this isnt taken to extreme... IE even if the imposible was available (zero latency), if combined with extremely poor bandwidth overall performance would be bad. Its one of those balancing acts Having the highest bandwidth without sacrificing too much latency is often the way to the best performance machine. DDR memorys often have extremely tight memory timings (as fast as 2/2/2/5 is quite common on ddr). While DDR2's are more common at 5/5/5/15, although the latest DDR2's are getting better, 3/3/3/12 is pretty respectable
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Man of Honour
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Aod, two points, one being that the member doesn't yet have access to the MM since they don't have 250 posts yet and secondly there is meant to be no trading outside the MM. 
