I am changing out my system board, currently a Soyo SY-K7V Dragon (with problems) and an Athlon Tbird 1Ghz, and plan to replace it with an Abit KD7A and an Athlon XP processor. I'd like to use whatever I can out of the old system. I currently have several 266Mhz 256MB sticks of PC2100 DDR ram and would like to upgrade but I am a little confused (easily done) regarding how the processor speeds and memory speeds need to be matched. I would like to take advantage of some higher speeds, perhaps 333 or 400 but I don't want to end up buying memory and a cpu with speeds that won't work together. I'm already plagued with stability problems.

Can I use, say, an XP 2600 at 333 Mhz or higher and 512 MB of Kingston DDR400 or do I need to use DDR333 - or even should I just stay with the 266Mhz sticks?

Or maybe I'm just in over my head!

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

you could use any speed memory your board can take with any speed processor your motherboard can take. although if the bus speed of the memory is slower than the processor bus your processor will be underclocked to match the memory, the board might run them out of sync, or you will need to overclock the memory(which i am not recommending) to match the processor bus. if the memory speed is faster than the processor bus it will be underclocked to match the processor. your best be is to get the DDR 333 or the DDR 400.

Thank you Snowman!!

Exactly what I needed to know.