RAM - Amount & compability

W

Wild_thing

New Member
Hello, i have some amateur questions about RAM memories here, i'm not very good at tech stuff and hence i turn to you. (Skip to the sentence at the bottom for the simple version of my questions)

My rig is a PC with 1.86 ghz intel core duo with 1 gb ram.
I also have a MSI P965 Neo mainboard that has 4 DIMM slots and can, according to the manual, house 8 Gigs of RAM which spawns two questions -

1) Is there any good reason to get more than 2 GBs of RAM? Other than the obvious increase in speed of course, but i was wondering if perhaps you can have too much RAM and either damage the computer or just have more than you need (meaning you've wasted money)

2) The product manual for my mainboard says it supports DDR2 533/667/800. However when browsing certain PC shops all i see is "DDR2 PC5300, PC6400". So which ones are supported by my mainboard? Do i need special rare ones or are these the ones i should get?

So in short - How do i identify the correct RAM type for my mainboard and should i get more than 2 GBs of RAM?
 
First off if your not running a 64 bit OS your system cant see more than 4gbs or alittle less due to hardware addresses. Its not going to be faster installing more Memory unless your system is using up all of the 2 gbs. and using your virtual memory on your harddrive. PC2 6400 is DDR2 800 / PC2 5300/5400 is DDR2 667 / DDR2 533 is PC2 4200
You can use these to find out the speed and size of the ram thats installed now and the rest of your hardware info.
http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php
http://www.sisoftware.net/index.html?dir=dload&location=sware_dl_3264
 
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Hmm alrite. I don't even know if my system is a 32 or 64 bit one nor exactly what a virtual memory is but anyway.

I saw i had 2x512MB PC5300 (operating at 667 MHz if i got this right), leaving two of the four slots free.

So if i got 2x1024MB PC5300 ones, i'd have 3Gb's of RAM, right? But that would be totally unnecessary since my rig probably can't use it anyway?
 
Ram

Windows 32bit will see 3.25gb of ram. That would be xp home, xp pro, Vista* and anything does not have x64 behind it. To run a x64 bit OS, you need a 64bit processor. x64 bit OS's will see anything from 4gb to 128gb. I run Windows XP Pro x64bit on my machine.
 
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