please help me with RAM trouble

U

ubamous3

1
i had an amd athlon with 512MB of memory; i just went and bought a 512MB kingston valueram DDR , but it doesnt seem to improve performance any; in fact, it gave me a blue screen of death when i was working on diff things as well as program crashing

my question is how do i know if it's a bad piece of RAM or it's just not compatible with current RAM or whatever; when i first installed it, i couldnt see the LAN for some reason; i finally got it to be networked ok, and then it acts kinda erratic

heres my system specs; i dont know much about hardware stuff at all so i can use all the help i can get

i am on win2kpro
amd athlon
CPU Type AMD Athlon XP, 2000 MHz (7.5 x 267) 2400+

Motherboard Name Jetway 866AS(E)/866AS ULTRA (RAID)/866ASR RAID/868AS (PRO)/V333DA/V333PRO/V333U

Motherboard Chipset VIA VT8375 ProSavageDDR KM266

current RAM i have is wintec 512MB pc2700 DDR (i look at AIDA32 reports and the wintec and kingston have the same specs so i thought they should be compatible)

oh, and the computer does see 1 gig of memory

thank u
 
U

ubamous3

1
hi LTR12101B ,

thanks for responding and the links :) in general, are RAMs with the same specs but from different brands compatible with each other or mixing brand is a no no? The first one is wintec and the new stick i just bought is kingston; they r both 512MB PC2700 DDR

the weird thing is that i just found out from the mobo's manual that it supports up to 2 184 pin DIMM PC1600/PC2100 for up to 2 gig total, but the 512MB wintec memory stick i have had since the beginning is PC2700 which is faster than recommended per the manual; so theoretically that wouldnt work but i have had it for over a year now and it's been working fine;i just wanted to add more RAM b/c i multitask a lot and so having more RAM would make things go smoothly
 
L

LTR12101B

1
In general, PC2700 should run ok at PC2100 speeds - it may even allow the rtimings to be tightened.

It SHOULD be possible to mix RAM brands, even specifications, but some motherboards are just plain troublesome with some brands, and even more so with a mix.

Since it can take 2 x 1Gb, it's not likely to be a chip density issue - not sure if that problem had died out before DDR anyway, but in SDRAM, some older boards have bank size limits that demand "double sided" memory if the largest allowable DIMM is used (eg. I can use 3x 256Mb, but they MUST be double sided - 128's or lower can be either double sided or single sided).
 
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