mixing memory brands

i faced the same dilemma a few months back, with cl 2.5 ram. I ended up buying the same brand of ram (kingmax), which had the same cas and other latencies, same size (2 X 512 mb), but different model (kingmax had moved to higher density of ram - the chips were only on one side of the PCB, as opposed to both sides of the PCB in my existing ram).

the result - windows was quite stable, no overall speed improvement (thou it did start up a bit quicker with the page file turned off), my PC randomly decided not to work in dual channel mode, and to my horror, my favourite game BF2 kept crashing randomly    

this problem might have been attributable to my motherboard - an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium. As nice a board this is, i still have issues with it such as the onboard sound randomly turning itself on. :roll:

end result - i went back to a one gig rig, used the other gig i bought to build another gaming machine, and am now $150 lighter of the pocket.

well it sounds like i will not get the performance increase i was hoping for or expecting.
I have a videocard with 128mb ram.....so perhaps the 1 gig i have will be all i need for good system performance.

I do not want to spend money for nothing especialy if the performance increase would be minimal.
thanks for the info

a cheaper solution to adding another 1 gig of ram is, if you've got an onboard raid chip, to create a RAID 0 array and run your page file off it.

Don't install any other programs on this raid disk, and partition it so that the page file is positioned on the fastest portion of the disk (the outside).

it will only be a marginal improvement, but it is better than running a page file off your C drive. i've noticed that with games like BF2 which are memory hogs, performace is better esp on the big maps with 64 players.

have fun mate 8)

You can do it, but wouldn't really recommend (different timings for different ram) so in theory you can do it, but IMO i'd get the exact matching ram!