ram

Good morn. my machine has 512mb of factory installed ram but with 64mb allocated for visual graphics, that nets me only 448mb of ram. the machine has two sticks of 256mb to equal the 512mb minus the 64mb. with supported speed of pc3200 mb/sec, ddr. i have two sticks of 256mb that i want to install with supported speed of 2100 mb/sec. can i mix the two speeds in an attempt to get me around 1000mb. my machine is a compaq presiaro sr1630nx with windows xp sp2. thx in advance for any info

 

First, i don't recommend to install different bus speed RAM modules over the same Board, that could be a problem.

And i don't know if there's more slots for other modules, i guess if you have extra slots for ram modules use compatible speeds to avoid any problem or get some broke up.

Ok, that's i had to say professionaly, personaly i used to do that in some Intel Boards, i even used 4 different modules in the same board, i know it's a crime but it works, some times some modules get broken sometimes not.

So if you think you are lucky and don't care if the computer got broken go ahead. But my first advice is to don't do that, i realized that because we have over 30 Boards to test and use and a lot of ol RAM modules.

 

Go to www.crucial.com/ , (memory upgrades) put it your specs, scan your computer and it will tell you what your machine will need.

 

If the machine would accept the 2100 speed RAM alongside the 3200 that is already installed, you will be running the machine at a much slower speed than you currently are.
The 3200 will clock itself down and run at the 2100 speed. Cancels out the advantage you would get if you installed 2 more sticks of 3200.

 

Isn't only that, it can burn the module because are running at different bus speed, that depends a lot of the board, that's why i told you about my experience doing that with cheap intel MoBos.

 

thank you all for the great info

 

Jeepers let's get some facts happening!

Googling your PC:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...c=en&cc=us&product=1122478&key=null&site=null

From here we see the motherboard is the A8AE-LE with 4 DIMM slots (RAM):

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00496280&cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en

The golden rule with mixing different speed RAM modules is they will all "downclock" and run at the slowest speed, i.e. DDR 2100. I have done this so many times it is not funny and are currently running 6GB of mixed speed from 2 different kits.

hrlow2 has a point but having only 512MB of RAM and running XP means the system will be constantly "page swapping" just to undertake mundane tasks (saw it 3 months ago) to such an extent even with RAM 10 times faster than current it "will make no difference" due to the relationship (correlation) between the RAM and FSB (& or CPU).

IMHO try it and I am sure you will see a significant improvement even at the DDR 2100 speed due to a significant reduction in "page file" swapping (HDD activity, emptying/refreshing cache, etc, etc).

Just make sure that the different kits are each within the different coloured slots, e.g. DDR 3200 both in the Blue, DDR 2100 both in the Black, so you get Dual Channel.

XP with 512MB is crippled!

Mix and match RAM is "very common".

You have nothing to lose by giving it a try.

 

Good and nice description, the best i readed.

Sorry that my englsih is so poor xD.

Btw, i used to run XP with 128MB