Hi, I want to put another 2x2Gb of RAM into my PC. Unfortuantely I've left it a bit too long and now DDR2 seems awful expensive and I am having problems finding 2 OCZ Gold to match my current RAM. Will mixing RAM cause me major problems? Or does any one know where I can get a couple of matching sticks for a reasonable price? Thanks in advance.
OCZ have stopped doing ram, might be worth finding out what make the actual ram chips themselves are and finding a brand with similar chips, would be useful to know the exaxt timings. If you can't find this out then as long as they have the same or better timings and clock speed then they should work together. if you find you can't boot or it's unstable, just loosen the timings a bit and re-tighten them one at a time until you find the culprit.
How do I find these things out? I don't know much about RAM timings, can you educate me? I have CPU-Z installed, and the memory screen says 400MHz 5-6-6-18. I don't really know what these numbers actually mean.
Basically the lower the numbers, the less cpu cycles it takes for the ram to complete the part of the process. Without getting in depth too much, basically If you want more DDR2 you'll want to go for 800MHz (CPUz says 400MHz but the effective speed is 800MHz as it is Double Data Ram) or higher, with the same timing figures or lower (lower numbers = tighter timings = faster)
IDave, start by going to Crucial.com & letting it do a system scan. it looks at what you have & matches to it's own spec of product line & you can use that information to determine what you need to buy. <edit>I hadn't heard OCZ had dropped out of the RAM business! they've still got the products listed on their websites!
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/01/11/ocz-leaves-dram-market/1 I guess they still have their products on the website for reference purposes. If you can't find 5-6-6-18 or lower then you can always change the figures in your bios (the 5 will be cas latency) before you install the new ram.
