Loc Track Sections

Loc Track Sections

Great Deals On Amazon Products

Can you Help me choose the perfect speed of RAM for my PC?

I've HP Pavilion m7260in PC with 256MB DDR2 RAM.

>Main Product Page http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/product?product=1140499&lc=en&cc=in&dlc=en&lang=en&tmp_track_link=ot_we/prodlink/en_in/1140499/loc:0&cc=in

I've 4 slots. So I want to buy 1GB for each three slots = 3GB RAM.

Problem is I don't know which speed to buy. When I go to my PC's page, It says it can support PC2-3200 MB/sec
But when I go to my Motherboard's page, it says it can support PC2 3200 (400 MHz) and PC2 4200 (533 MHz) DDR2-DIMMS
So what do you think I should do?

See for yourself (Check the 'Memory' Section)>
PC's Page http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00579246&tmp_task=prodinfoCategory&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&lang=en&product=1140499#N1801

Motherboard's Page http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00300023&tmp_task=prodinfoCategory&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&lang=en&product=1140499

THe best thing to do is to REPLACE the one stick you do have. What you want to do is buy what is called a DUAL PAIRED RAM SET. This means, two sticks which have been factory tested for compatibility, they are timed exactly. When you populate two slots with the same size and speed of ram you create what is called DUAL CHANNEL...dual channel is double the data rate of speed.
So 400 Mhz DDR2 becomes 800 Mhz and there is a big difference in speed.

If you buy three other sticks of non-paired RAM, you will not gain dual channel and you will have a lot of SLOW ram which doesn't do anything to improve performance.

First of all, you should run Belarc Advisor and that will tell you exactly what kind of RAM you have.

http://www.belarc.com

It is free and gives you a fantastic readout of what you have.

Then, you can go to CRUCIAL. COM and run the active x scanner and it will tell you the exact kind of ram you can install on the computer. Look for a dual channel replacement kit, and what I would do is buy 2 paired sets to populate all four slots.

For the first set, you want to populate slots 1 and 3
For the second set, populate slots 2 and 4

Most DDR2 dual channel boards require that you skip the even slot. You want to make sure you keep those sticks exactly paired, so slot 1 & 3 first, then 2 & 4 should work on 99% of all the DDR2 RAM type mobo's.

You should check out Newegg.com after consulting with Crucial and see if you can get a deal. Look for the lowest cas latency you can buy, the last number in the set of numbers is the CAS and the lower the number the better!.

I use OCZ, PATRIOT, GSKILL, MUNCHKIN, and CORSAIR RAM on the computers I build and have had Very Good experience with them all.