RAM help.

[Uncle_bob]

Ok, Uncle has been contemplating buying more RAM for his computer. Currently he only has 128 MB of RAM. That's very un-good for him. A 100 year old man has more memory than that.

And so, Uncle has been reading up and finding that there are so many more things to memory than just the size. There's voltage, "unbuffered", "registered", pins (gold and silver?), and things along those lines that just freak him out beacuse he doesn't know if these are important or not.

Currently Uncle is using a Dell Optiplex GX1p with one 128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM RAM card.

So would Uncle be fine if he just grabs a 512 MB card as long as it's PC100 ECC SDRAM? http://pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_mad.gif Or does the voltage and such really make a big difference?

[Blitzkommando]

You will also need to read up on the motherboard. Motherboards will limit the size of the RAM. I am assuming it is an older computer, and that might limit each socket to anything between 128, 256 or even 512 MB per socket. Also, another factor is that if you do decide to keep the 128MB RAM in, you will need another 128MB RAM stick to match it. Some motherboards you don't need the RAM to be in pairs, but many, especially older motherboards, can be very picky and not recognize two different size RAM sticks.

To find out your motherboard to read up on it, I would recommend CPU-Z. ( http://www.cpuid.org/cpuz.php ) From there it will tell you pretty much anything you need to know about RAM and the motherboard for this particular situation.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: BLITZKOMMANDO on 2005-10-16 19:13 ]</font>

[Uncle_bob]

Thanks! http://pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif Though I don't know why the hell this got moved to a PSO forum. :|

[VioletSkye]

On 2005-10-16 19:05, Uncle_bob wrote:
Ok, Uncle has been contemplating buying more RAM for his computer. Currently he only has 128 MB of RAM. That's very un-good for him. A 100 year old man has more memory than that.

And so, Uncle has been reading up and finding that there are so many more things to memory than just the size. There's voltage, "unbuffered", "registered", pins (gold and silver?), and things along those lines that just freak him out beacuse he doesn't know if these are important or not.

Currently Uncle is using a Dell Optiplex GX1p with one 128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM RAM card.

So would Uncle be fine if he just grabs a 512 MB card as long as it's PC100 ECC SDRAM? http://pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_mad.gif Or does the voltage and such really make a big difference?


The CPU-Z program Blitz mentioned is good for getting info and is easy to read. EVEREST (http://www.lavalys.com/products/overview.php?pid=1〈=en) is a better program and gives you alot more info though, so you may just want to download that and get used to it. Its easy to use and easy to find info once you mess around with it a bit.

For your purposes, you need to find out how many slots your motherboard has for ram modules, what type of ram it supports and possbily what the maximum amount of memory it can have. Also find out if its dual or single channel. ECC is not important for your purposes (it stands for error correcting circuits, error correcting code, or error correction code) and is really only important if you are running a server. ECC RAM has an extra chip/s that not only check parity but correct any errors on the fly.

Registered means that it contains a register that makes sure that data is being processed correctly and is typically slower than unbuffered ram. This is also really only useful for larger servers handling large amounts of memory. I highly doubt that your chipset requires the use of registered memory.

You didn't mention OS but considering how old your RAM is, I would venture to guess you are running Win 98 or Win ME (or at least one of those was the OS that the system came with.) Chances are your motherboard may not take anything higher than PC 133 (and possibly the PC 100 is all it will take) as I doubt it will support DDR or RDRAM. Theoretically you can use PC 133 on mobos that only support PC 100 and the PC 133 will operate at PC 100 speeds, but this can (and often does) cause problems. So if you call someplace and they tell you that they only have PC 133 and it will work just fine, just be aware that it may not work fine lol.

I did a quick check on your PC model and see that 768MB looks to be the max memory your motherboard will support (which is descent.) It will take ECC and Non ECC. If you mix the two, the ECC will be disabled on the stick that has it. It also looks like you have 3 slots to use for memory sticks. It also showed PC 100 (168 PIN) as the only upgrade as far as RAM goes.

You should be able to add a stick of 512MB PC100 ECC or Non-ECC. http://pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_smile.gif


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: VioletSkye on 2005-10-16 20:29 ]</font>