RAM Compatibililty

I'm thinking about getting a RAM upgrade for my PC, but I have a little question.

If I have 3 sticks of 512MB Corsair PC3200 400MHz Dual Channel DDR RAM and a stick of 1 GB 1024MB Corsair PC5300 400MHz ect. will the Memory be compatible and at its full potential?

Right now I have 4 512MB Corsairs (all PC3200) and I don't want to send 100$ on and upgrade that won't work.

And just for incase, (Sckt939) ASUS A8N-SLI nForce4 SLI Chipset SATA RAID Dual PCIE MB w/Gb-LAN, USB2.0, IEEE-1394, &7.1 Audio is my motherboard.

Thanks!

Please go here to check what memory your MoBo supports:

http://www.crucial.com/

It is NEVER a good idea to mix memory types, at the worst it won't work, and at best you will only run at the performance of the slowest strip.

Similarly, whilst motherboards might work with faster memory, if they don't support it you are effectively wasting your money. OK you might put in faster memory because it is cheaper, but that would be a fairly old machine.

Incidentally, why do you want to increase the memory.................are you getting "out of memory" messages?



;)

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If I have 3 sticks of 512MB Corsair PC3200 400MHz Dual Channel DDR RAM and a stick of 1 GB 1024MB Corsair PC5300 400MHz ect. will the Memory be compatible and at its full potential?

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There's a part of me that wants to smack you and a part of me that wants to help you... You want to mix a DDR2 DIMM with 4 dual channel DDR DIMM's... Not only can you NOT do that, but even if you could the other 3 wouldn't be running in dual channel mode and the 5300 stick would only be running at 400mhz... which brings me to my next point...

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1024MB Corsair PC5300 400MHz

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?????

Hey, The Duck,

That is why my first suggestion was to check what the MoBo will support.............as far as I can see that one will only handle PC3200 DDR 400MHz.

AFAIK DDR2 PC5300 should run at 667MHz (I bet they overclocked it by 1 to avoid the mark of the beast :D )

Apart from the general principles of:

1. Don't mix memory types.
2. They will only work as fast as the MoBo supports.
3. They will only work as fast as the slowest strip.

What is the real question here? It sounds like some sort of gaming box to me, but why does he want to increase the RAM over 2Gb?

I could possibly understand wanting to increase the speed of the RAM, but not the quantity?

There is also the question of balance in relation to other components and what the applications requirements are.

Like what video card setup has he, what RAID array is he running (there can be quite a difference between RAID0 and RAID1)? and so on.

:)