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I am getting a new motherboard that takes DDR memory. Its been awhile since I have upgraded hardware and I am out of touch with DDR.
First- is it backwards compatible? Can I put my old DIMM's in the DDR slots?
Second- what do all the numbers mean? I see 1600, 2100, 2400, 2700, 3000, 3200, 3500, 3700, 4000 and 4200. How do you tell what kind works with which motherboard or how do you decide which one to buy?
You cannot mix DDR with DIMMS. However, you can put only DIMMS in there but cannot mix DIM and DDR together because of the different voltages they use, and the way they communicate with the board.
I'm working on your second question. I know what most of them mean but have forgotten some.
DDR RAM gets it's name because it can transfer twice as much data as SDRAM in the same amount of time.
The higher the number....the faster the version.
This is another site,
http://www.ddrsdrammemory.com/which_ddr_ram.html
2100, 2700 ... It is all the Clock frequencies. THey get that number in a weird way. You should at least match up the FSB of the processor if not go higher. I have a Barton Core AMD XP 2500+ with 333 FSB so I use PC-2700 that runs at 333 (166MHZ) Dual Data rate.