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XPS memory upgrade advice

post #1 of 5
2/24/07 at 6:00am
Thread Starter 
So I am finally fed up with only having 512mb ram on this machine, its time to upgrade. I have currently:

3.4ghz pent 4
2 x 256 mb ram
60gb 7200rpm hdd
256mb mr9800

I don't do a whole lot of gaming anymore, but still will want the option. Here is my question, Can I use a single 1gig stick combined with one of my 256's??? Would I have any problems with this???

I want to upgrade to 1 gig now, but I dont want to waste money if I decide to upgrade to 2gigs down the road. (I would get the same type/brand of ram)

Also, I noticed that on new egg the corsair is a 2.6 voltage while crucial is 2.5. Will this make a difference? What about the latency differences??? What should I be looking for?

Thanks for the help!
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post #2 of 5
2/24/07 at 10:02pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark_Pyro7
I don't do a whole lot of gaming anymore, but still will want the option. Here is my question, Can I use a single 1gig stick combined with one of my 256's??? Would I have any problems with this???
Yes, no problems.
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post #3 of 5
2/25/07 at 12:30pm
There will be no problems, however when you mix Dimm sizes, you turn off the dual channel feature (in bios). The dual channel feature is striping across the two Dimms for additional performance. The only catch is the Dimms must be the same size.

I've used a single 1 GB dimm in my system and it worked just fine (testing it out for someone else). I will say though, you will be amazed at just how much of a kick you will get out of your system now that you've gone above 512 MB.

I recommend using Crucial memory as I've never had any memory issues with Crucials memory where Corsair i've had issues in the past (i guess you could say those few impressions a couple of years ago have tainted my judgement on corsair memory).

Good luck in whatever you choose.
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post #4 of 5
2/26/07 at 2:34pm
If you don't do a lot of gaming or anything intense 2 gb may not be necessary right now, Id go with 2 512 sticks, ram gets cheaper and cheaper so in the future when you want 2 gb, I'm sure price wise it will be feasible
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post #5 of 5
3/2/07 at 2:19am
^^ It's more cost efficient to get the 1Gb stick now, and simply buy another down the track if you wanna upgrade to 2GB later. As the others have mentioned, yes running a 1GB + 256MB stick will mean you cannot run in dual channel.... but the performance hit is negligible at best and having the extra 256MB (vs getting 2x512MB sticks) far outweights it. Don't worry about the small voltage or latency differences, generally they are unnoticeable in real world useage.

Stu
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