The KGB Oracle Forums General Public Discussion (PUBLIC) The Pub 8 gig of ram for $180

I just bought 8gig of RAM for $180 (2x 4gig kits with Free shipping and no Mail in Rebates ) on newegg if anyone is thinking about buy more RAM. Link

timings are a bit big but still an awesome value, NICE

Yeah I know that the 4-4-4-12 is the timing most ppl want but I heard that the 5-5-5-15 has better stability. Is that true or false?

I'd say thats probably true specifcally with the tRAS timing, say for example a 2-3-2-6 set ram, if it's lower it takes less time for an entire set of data to loop through the ram stick inbetween each charge, which makes it faster compared to the same stick that has 4-4-4-12 but that 6 set has a higher risk of corrupting your data which leads to the "blue screen of death" every once and while, but in the case of a 12 vs a 15 set, unless your motherboard is horribly picky or horribly old you shouldn't have that much of a problem, if it does, id go with flashing the board or getting a more flexiable one, something else to consider is that even if your timings are perfect for your board it could still lead to instabilty by the level of heat that it produces or how overclocked it's other timings are, like tREF, ive had instances where it will just sit there without any power about 30min into a boot and the ram will just lose power and ill get blue screened, so id say your motherboard would play a bigger role on how stable your ram is more then the timings. too much or too little of something is never good, LOL. ive had machines that run 2-3-3-4 without a hitch, i think it just matters on how beasty your motherboard is.

I am looking to go from 2 to 4 gig. I have ddr2-sdrm (pc2-4200) 533mhz.
Options are to upgrade to better or just add more of the same.
I need to know if I can upgrade or am I stuck with what it came with. Or is what I have ok for just playing mmos.
Also can you mix different types of the same, as in one says EXTREME DDR2 and the other say DDR2

Well, it depends on your motherboard, how much FSB it can handle and how many ram slots it has for you to reach 4gigs and the processor you have on your computer. If you have a 64bit processor then when you hitch on those 4gigs, you might not have such a hard time, chances are that it will just pick those up and be on it's way. On a 32bit proc though, that might be a little different, depending on if your board comes with a decent memroy index. Usually when you install brand new ram for the first time, it get indexed and sorted sort of like how on a MAC, the HD gets indexed, they call it journaling and it just basically means that it's tallying up the ram for faster use. Well if you have a nice special board it will index all 4096 of your ram, otherwise it might tell you, you have somewhere between the 3 to 3.5 range of ram when you really have 4 gigs, because it takes into account your video ram and it's limit of index and registrar is 4Gigs regardless.

It doesn't quite mean that you arn't using all 4gigs upon boot it just means that the computer doesn't know it's own strength type of thing. Technically it should use all 4 gigs but it just won't have the entire thing registered, and it might take a performance hit since it would have to resync those sticks in the bios everytime it's cycled, theoretically anyway. In any case I would go just up to 3, just to be safe, however if your willing to try it out and then if it doesn't work out, you can just return it; and just have 3 gigs. 533mhz is decent but if you have the monies, I would find out how much FSB my motherboard can do and purchase your ram accordingly.

If you bought your computer from like say Dell or some of these major computer retailers, then you can find out what kind of motherboard you have just from the model number infront of the case. The difference is not alot but somewhat significant from lets say a 533 and a 667 but still there's something that would help you computer be faster. If that is stock RAM, then chances are you probably have room for improvement. You can overclock your FSB speeds by upchanging the modules on your board with the right Bios and you could go with even 800 if you do it right but overclocking anything to it's limits usually means less longevity.

And as for the mixing of RAM sticks, I wouldn't have two different sticks on the same channel on your board because your not using it's full potential. Let's say you have a 677, on one and an 800 on the other on the same channel, the bios will configure itself to the slower stick as default and your faster stick will take a performance hit, so ideally it's better to have identical sticks that are at the fastest speeds without stepping outside the bounds of compatability. But you can atleast on recent motherboards to date. Back in the day motherboards wouldn't boot up at all because the bios had no revert compatiblity when presented with offchanging sticks but that should no longer be the case and from the speed of the stock ram that you have on your computer I'd say your computer is fairly recent, atleast not older then 4 years, so that shouldn't be an issue. The Extreme business, the only thing that I could think of as to why one would be extreme and the other not is that one is manufacturedly overclocked, which makes no difference but your bios will default it's settings to the non-overclocked stick. So it will work just you just won't be as Extreme. lol But yeah you can mix different speeds and timings on most motherboards just your operating at the slower rate..

What OS are you running???? I thought you had to have either Linux or XP 64 to address more than 4 gigs...

You do, for more then 4gigs but for exactly 4gigs which is what Helemoto wants, it's possible to do it on 32bit windows. The limitation isn't set by the OS your running, it' set by the motherboard design frame which then sets the OS your allowed to run on your machine.

OK heres what I got. HP m8000n. Yes I did not build my own I bought a family computer so my wife would not bury me in the yard. It came with 2 gig with 2 extra slots. I put in a 7600gs vid card(it only came with onboard one). Has AMD Athlon 64x2 dual core 5200+. 32 bit vista.

I am just on this side of stupid when it comes to computers so Can you change from 32 to 64??? Is that the windows program or is it in the motherboard??

Is there a sit to check what motherboard you have. I am assuming the motherboard is the telltell for how much you can upgrade.

With this system will getting more ram help or will I even notice?

Thanks for the INFO guys.