Ram Question

[Wayne Brewster]

My question for you is. Can I add a 1gb RAM chip next to a 512mb RAM.
Right now my computer has 1 512MB RAM in it. Tomorrow im buying a 1gb RAM chip. So would be okay to have them run together?

[Mazza]

No.. i think they have to be the same size and speed

Not sure though :-/

[T1MT1M]

dunno if this helps but my dad has a 256 and 512 next to each other in his laptop

[NickN]

My question for you is. Can I add a 1gb RAM chip next to a 512mb RAM.
Right now my computer has 1 512MB RAM in it. Tomorrow im buying a 1gb RAM chip. So would be okay to have them run together?

Hi Wayne.. and welcome to the zoo  :)


The short answer is you can add the memory however you will give up dual channel operation if you do. You are much better off adding a matched pair and pulling the single 512. The memory will run faster in dual operation with 2 1GB sticks and besides FS9/FSX will run much better on 2GB than 1 or 1.5.

[HarvesteR]

usually when you plug in 2 different chips with non-matching speeds, the pc will run them at the speed of the slowest one... so you might actually gain more performance if you stay with a single 1GB chip than with the 1.5GB and slower speed... i think... it might not be that great a speed loss, if the speed on your chips are not too far apart...

since you only have 512MB installed, i think you're not doing dual-channel anyways, so i'd experiment and see which combination runs faster... or post the speeds on those chips here so we can take a better look at it

Cheers

HarvesteR

[MadWings]

I agree with what Nick says about RAM. But you might consider what HarvesteR suggests, because the proof of the pudding is in the eating. (Besides, I'm curious about the results )

On good programm to test you RAM performance is SiSoft Sandra. The Lite version is free to use (download here). Besides many other things, it can test your RAM latency (how fast the memory responds) and the RAM efficiency (how much of the memory's theoretical bandwidth the CPU actually uses). In addition to testing "how fast it feels" with your favourite game(s), these numbers should give you an idea about what memory setup you're better off with.

Hope this helps. Kind regards.

[Ferrari308guy]

You can put RAM of different sizes together, but not RAM of different types. So, running a 512MB stick and a 1GB stick is no problem. In my computer, I have 2 512MB sticks, and 2 1GB sticks running together.

What you need to make sure is that your RAM is of the same type. Your signature says you have a 512mb PC3200 @418MHz stick in there. So you need to make sure that you have PC3200 RAM that you buy.

This is 2 gigs of PC3200 RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820145440

This is SDRAM, so this would work only with other SDRAM sticks (other types could be DDR2 and DDR3). So just be sure that you know exactly what you have.