by danpaul88 » January 18th, 2010, 4:04 pm
If you put a 2gb stick of RAM into a motherboard which can only support 1gb sticks one of the following will happen;
a) Nothing, the memory controller will not recognise the RAM at all and will fail to boot.
b) The memory controller will address the maximum amount of RAM it is able to on a single stick of RAM and it will function as a 1gb stick, with the remaining 1gb wasted because the memory controller does not have a large enough address buffer to utilize it.
Your best option is 2x 1gb sticks. Get some decent sticks with high clock speed and low latency if your trying to boost performance as much as possible, the difference between DDR2-400 and DDR2-800 can be surprising. My only caveat on that is you should avoid DDR2-1066 *unless* your motherboard manual specifically states that it can support that unofficial DDR2 clock speed.
For instance two of these 1gb DDR2-800 CL5 sticks:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/120446
Unfortunately you picked a very bad time to upgrade your RAM, prices have more than doubled in the last few months... I bought 8gb (4x2gb) of Crucial Ballistix RAM for £75 about 4 months ago, the same RAM from the same website now costs over £170.
If you put a 2gb stick of RAM into a motherboard which can only support 1gb sticks one of the following will happen;
a) Nothing, the memory controller will not recognise the RAM at all and will fail to boot.
b) The memory controller will address the maximum amount of RAM it is able to on a single stick of RAM and it will function as a 1gb stick, with the remaining 1gb wasted because the memory controller does not have a large enough address buffer to utilize it.
Your best option is 2x 1gb sticks. Get some decent sticks with high clock speed and low latency if your trying to boost performance as much as possible, the difference between DDR2-400 and DDR2-800 can be surprising. My only caveat on that is you should avoid DDR2-1066 *unless* your motherboard manual specifically states that it can support that unofficial DDR2 clock speed.
For instance two of these 1gb DDR2-800 CL5 sticks: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/120446
Unfortunately you picked a very bad time to upgrade your RAM, prices have more than doubled in the last few months... I bought 8gb (4x2gb) of Crucial Ballistix RAM for £75 about 4 months ago, the same RAM from the same website now costs over £170.