Questions about switching RAM

[thornhill]

Hi, I have an HP xt948 with a ASUS P4B-LA (Amazon) motherboard. I only have 256MB of 133MHz SDRAM, I'm a little too rough on my computer for that amount of memory and it's causing me problems. Money is a little tight right now so I'm trying to scavenge parts from some old computers that are sitting around. I found 3 sticks of Apacer 128MB 100MHz in 1 case and 2 sticks of Liberty 512MB 133MHz DDR400 PC3200 in another. In an ideal world I'd like to take out my 256 and put in the 2 512's. But I get the impression the DDRs aren't compatible. Is that true? If it is, would it make sense to switch out the 256 for the 3 128's (to keep the speed the same). Or since they're slower (100 vs 133) would the speed loss counteract any benefit of an extra 128MB? Any advice would be much appreciated.

 

[Rik]

Pc 133 is the ram to use. The ddr400 ram is not compatible.

 

[Tedster]

Please read the upgrading ram guide in the guides forum.

 

[Didou]

Changing the ram to 384MB won't change much from the current 256MB. You could try to add two 128MB modules to the initial 256MB, as that would bring in a sufficient change in every day usage (even if all the memory modules are brought down to run at the speed of the slowest module: 100MHz).

Once you install the new ram, always run a memtest to see if things are working well together.