RAM Upgrading Question

[Xleins]

anyone know if there is a way to look in Windows XP to see how much RAM the motherboard can hold?

[CrayZii-InDiaN]

it depends on how many slots does your motherboard have... if it has... 3 slots .. then you can have 3.. 256 MB ram or .. 3 .. 512 MB ram or even 3.. 1 GB ram.. or all mixed up.. so check how many slots you have..?

but you dont need much ram you only need about less than 2 GB ram to run your pc smooth at all times..

[Dymond]

Yeah the OS will tell you how much you have but not how much you can hold..and damn you DR for beating me to the question LOL

[kurtis469]

it depends on how many slots does your motherboard have... if it has... 3 slots .. then you can have 3.. 256 MB ram or .. 3 .. 512 MB ram or even 3.. 1 GB ram.. or all mixed up.. so check how many slots you have..?

but you dont need much ram you only need about less than 2 GB ram to run your pc smooth at all times..

he is correct its all about how many slots u have

but what i dont understand about ram mem is the sd and the ddr and all the differnt types can they all be interchangeable ???:hijacked:

[Jacx]

did you buy this pc from a shop or was it build for you?

Do you have the motherboard manual?

can you tell us what the pc is called and the specs when you bought it?

How old is it?

all the above helps identify.

If in doubt, open the side panel and look at the slots, is there anyspare and if so how many?

Do the slots have 1 or 2 notches?

can you see the name of the motherboard and a number relating to what board of the range the company make.

with all that info...it will take me a minute to google it and find the correct page!...or even yourself

get the info and we can help you out.

Dymond, come on fella, time to make a cheat sheet for noob pc builders and modifiers ;)

[steff]

Ok, I sat Computing in 2004/2005 and I never listened because both my teachers were bams. It was a free period and I spent most of the time outside the class. I did learn how to code in 2 computing languages though. :D

Anyway, on topic, I'm sure I recall (well I more hazily recall) one of the teachers telling me that if you buy a 2GB of RAM upgrade then it might not wor to it's full capability because (this is where it becomes hazy and I really start forgetting) the bus can only transmit so many signals as your processor allows... or some shite like that. Is that true? Or if you subbed in the correct words would it become true?

[CrayZii-InDiaN]

Ok, I sat Computing in 2004/2005 and I never listened because both my teachers were bams. It was a free period and I spent most of the time outside the class. I did learn how to code in 2 computing languages though. :D

Anyway, on topic, I'm sure I recall (well I more hazily recall) one of the teachers telling me that if you buy a 2GB of RAM upgrade then it might not wor to it's full capability because (this is where it becomes hazy and I really start forgetting) the bus can only transmit so many signals as your processor allows... or some shite like that. Is that true? Or if you subbed in the correct words would it become true?

that is true it wont give you full capacity.. so its better to break it down to 1 GB chip and have 2 chip of 2 GB

or if you want 1 GB try havin 2 chip of 512 MB each it works better...



and lolz to dave.. someone has to help ;)


and each motherboard has fidderent sets of chipz and not all ram chips can work on all motherboards.. some ram has 1 teeth and some ram has 2 teeth.. so toy have be carefull on that you put in :)

[Dymond]

You would be better with 2-1GB sticks of RAM as opposed to 1- 2GB stick if thats what your saying. If you can you should always pair RAM as opposed to getting one bigger stick. I want to say its because of Parity but that doesn't sound right. I may need to come back to this one later.

DAMMIT DR stop doing that LOL

and Jacx if I would have gotten it first I would have expounded a bit more. :-)

[steff]

If I got a RAM upgrade... would my PC be faster and be able to load Paint without crashing?

[CrayZii-InDiaN]

If I got a RAM upgrade... would my PC be faster and be able to load Paint without crashing?

its no use having 1 or 2 GB ram when you cant use them at the right time... so if you can split up your RAM sticks you have a better chance of getting your pc run faster...

[steff]

its no use having 1 or 2 GB ram when you cant use them at the right time... so if you can split up your RAM sticks you have a better chance of getting your pc run faster...


Sorry that question was a completely different one. The first one was a "what if" from a hazy memory. :P

My current RAM is 128MB of Ram... if I bought one 512MB or one 1GB, would that speed my PC up considerably? Or would I have to also upgarde my 1.7Gigahertz proccessor too?

[CrayZii-InDiaN]

you have to upgrade your processor also lolz... no point having 2 GB ram wen u have pentium 3 or something like that...


pentium 3 will give you the best class as it can.. so try upgrading everything.. or just buy all the parts and build your very own pc with the things you like :)

[tca]

Sorry that question was a completely different one. The first one was a "what if" from a hazy memory. :P

My current RAM is 128MB of Ram... if I bought one 512MB or one 1GB, would that speed my PC up considerably? Or would I have to also upgarde my 1.7Gigahertz proccessor too?

SOMEONE shares my pain :w00t2:

though as for what someone said earlier about DDR and SD RAM, No they aren't interchangable, to my knowledge, your computer has to have the specific type in it to run and the other kind won't work

Eg...My computer takes DDR RAM, so if i were to buy some SD RAM and put it in my computer, it wouldn't work

I think, it's been awhile since i actually really looked into RAM

[Bellows]

the reason its better to pair your ram up is because with 2 sticks new processors run the ram in whats called Dual Channel, *hugs his 2gb DDR500*

[-=REMO=-]

Steff, yes upgrading your RAM will make a difference, although I wouldn't bother going higher than about 512MB without upgrading your processor.


TCA is right, SD and DDR are not interchangable, you can only use one or the other (although, good luck putting the wrong sort in your computer as they are physically different to avoid confusion).


Whether or not you have a Dual Channel motherboard or not you're going to get better performance as you have approx. twice the bandwidth because your sticks will run in parallel. eg.

512MB @ 400MHz + 512MB @ 400MHz = 1024MB @ 800 MHz.

As I understand it Dual Channel has to do with synchronization of the sticks in order to reduce the overhead involved in dealing with data spread over the 2 sticks.

[Dymond]

Thanx Remo and Bellows! Its been awhile since I had to remember that.. I agree with the assessment that Steff is better off getting the RAM first. Honestly running XP with 128 MB of Ram is more of a bottleneck than the processor since after XP loads I'm sure he's hitting the swap file heavily and we all know disk access sucks compared to accessing RAM. A Faster processor would not stop the constant disk access while hitting the swap file.

[Ridgeback]

Hold on, when I upgraded my home pc, the amount of RAM I could install wasn't down to how many slots it had, it was down to how much the motherboard could cope with. This might be different with new mb's, but my previous mb could only cope with 1gb total

[steff]

Well provided mine can cope with 2x256MB's then Im good. :)

[Dymond]

Hold on, when I upgraded my home pc, the amount of RAM I could install wasn't down to how many slots it had, it was down to how much the motherboard could cope with. This might be different with new mb's, but my previous mb could only cope with 1gb total

He is right on some older motherboards they were limited to the total Megabytes in each slot.

[-=REMO=-]

Steff, any motherboard capable of running a 1.7GHz processor should be capable of holding atleast 1GB of RAM total.

Just to clarify on Dymond's previous post, all motherboards (including newer ones) are limited to the amount of RAM they can hold, it's just that now the amount is like 2GB a slot so you generally don't have to worry...

[Dymond]

Steff, any motherboard capable of running a 1.7GHz processor should be capable of holding atleast 1GB of RAM total.

Just to clarify on Dymond's previous post, all motherboards (including newer ones) are limited to the amount of RAM they can hold, it's just that now the amount is like 2GB a slot so you generally don't have to worry...

REMO thanx for clarifying that. Thats what I meant. With older motherboards the slot and total RAM limit might be an issue but with a newer one I doubt most people could hit the top end easily.