Mix and Match Memory

[Eagle]

OK Ive come to the conclusion that I just have to have more memory if it kills me. I cant afford much, I'm a poor man these days. My brother recently fried his CPU and used Dual Channel DDR now, so what I want to know is if I put his PC2100 stick in with my PC2700 what happens? Does one overclock, does one underclock? Do they run at independent speeds (I doubt it). Will they even work together at all. I think I could safely overclock one, and I would sacrifice the speed to underclock if it meant getting another 256MB at this point. Does anyone have any idea?

 

[-Shadow-]

Whaaaargh ! Don't even think of driving a PC266 ram @ PC333 speeds . Set the FSB in the bios to 133Mhz (266 DDR) . The PC333 Ram bar gets underclocked , but thats not harmful....

The speed loss between 512MB and 256Mb is more than the one between PC333 and PC266 nowadays .

 

[Eagle]

Yeah I figured as much, thats why I would rather sacrifice the speed for the extra memory. But my question is, will it work?

 

[PsyMan]

Probably it will work, it depends on the mainboard (and its bios). There is also no possibility for one of your memories to be automatically overclocked in order to be used with the other, but the fastest must be downclocked either automatically or manually for stability reasons. If your mainboard supports dual channel be sure NOT to put the memories on the same channel.

 

[Eagle]

nope, no dual channel support, I also read to put the slower mem chip in the first slot so it would detect it first cause some boards only read one chip to set the speed.

 

[revl8er]

I remember doing something like that to my cousins piece of shit pc. He had a hp 1.2 ghz pc with 256mb pc100 ram and I installed an extra 128mb pc133 and it worked fine.

 

[zAlbee]

I also read to put the slower mem chip in the first slot so it would detect it first cause some boards only read one chip to set the speed.

i'd say those must be shitty motherboards, but it sounds like a good precaution.

it should work. iirc you'll be using a 133 FSB with that athlon right?