RAM Questions

I'm upgrading my RAM pretty soon. I have a few questions.
- Can you mix RAM brands? Ex. Lets say I have a 128 stick of Kingston RAM and I but 2 more sticks of 128 from another manufacturer.. Will this work alright?
- Ex. PC2100, PC2700.. What do these numbers exactly mean, I know tey have something to do with the speed of the RAM.

 

Go here
http://www.crucial.com/promo/index.asp?prog=dtlpbanr&AID=5470533&PID=1291624

 

short answer, Yes, you can mix memory brands--MOST of the time. i've heard stories where two refused to work together, but most likely that was caused by the speed and timings rather than the brands.

the "pc" rating for RAM refers to the theoretical Bandwidth that the RAM has. pc2700 has 2700MB/s bandwidth capacity, and runs at DDR333, meaning the Front Side Bus (FSB for short) of the RAM is clocked at 333Mhz.

if you want to upgrade your RAM, here are a few things good to know about your system. What kind of Chipset does your motherboard use? what kind of processor do you have? What speed RAM will your motehrboard's chipset allow you to use?

if you give us your System Specs, we can answer any questions you might have.

 

I put this in the wrong forum >_< (Sorry)

Anyways thanks for the help. Crucial has a good price for what I'm looking for. Thanks all.

 

More accurately, the PC rating is 8 times the FSB speed (because the bandwidth is 8 times the FSB speed).

DDR333 --> 2664 MB/s --> PC2700
DDR400 --> 3200 MB/s --> PC3200

You can go the other way, too:
PC2100 --> 2100 MB/s --> DDR266 (from this we can see that the actual bandwidth is 2128 MB/s)

 

http://corsairmicro.com/corsair/products/tech/memory_basics/

That's a great resource for memory info. It's a Memory Basics flash presentation, but it goes into a lot of depth. I'd highly reccommend that anybody interested in how memory works and what those number on it mean to watch it.

And actually, watching it again some of what I said above is not entirely correct.