Been meaning to upgrade my PC for a while but it ended up seeing me through Oblivion with some quite respectable frames to eye candy ratio so i didn't bother, but now with lots of thing requiring shader 3.0 I've started to upgrade but I've not got a clue about which ram is compatible with which, and if i can still run in dual with different selections

My PC currently has

P4 Prescott 3Ghz
P4P800 E Delux http://www.asus.com/products.aspx? [...] odelmenu=1
X800 Vivo
1GB of Corsair 512MB DDR400 PC3200 XML or XMS

I've just brought an AGP edition of the HD 3850 only to realize i didn't have a good enough power supply in my PC and was thinking about adding more ram into my system whilst i'm ordering something anyway and i think the ram is the weakest part of my system

Will any ram that is DDR400 PC3200 work with my current ram or does the XML or XMS bit mean something? will having more than two mean that i lose out on the duel channel part? And if i add aditional ram does it matter which goes in the two blue slots and which goes in the two black slots? I'm pretty lost.

Sorry for the poorly layed out post, I'm terrible at that.

One bump before i give up

The XML/XMS i believe is just branding by corsair. I dont believe the ram is special in anyway.

You should theoretically be able to put any ram DDR 400/PC3200 in with your current ram without harm, however

If your concerned about performance; You would want to get ram that was around the same spec of your old ram ie same CAS latency, unless you decide to ditch the old stuff (which i would recommend)

I would recommend upgrading to a mobo with DDR2, DDR is dated, and DDR3 is already mainstream(but pricey)


I'm in the same boat as you, I spent lots of cash on my box when it was new, but now AGP, DDR, socket 478, are dated. need to upgrade to PCI-E, DDR2, lga775. you can get a nice budget mobo on newegg for about 60 bucks, and cheap DDR2 ram. even the 60 buck boards come with one pci-e 16x.

It just depends on your budget for upgrades, it is alot to upgrade CPU, GPU, RAM and MOBO at the same time, but it really is the best way for people in our situation. I went and bought DDR500/PC4000, but now DDR3 is running at DDR1333/PC12XXX

Regarding XMS vs other generic RAM:

The XMS series of RAM has better RAM ICs than the Corsair Value series. Thus as a result you can OC better on the XMS based RAM. This applies to other manufactures as well. If you are looking for a high OC look for RAM that is known to have D9 Micron chips. (ie. Crucial Ballastix)

(3650th post )

Thank you for the posts, that cleared up alot of things.

I'd love to upgrade the whole thing but everything is a lot more expensive here in the UK so i'm going for this one last upgrade using my old Motherboard

And i don't think the place i ordered my 3D card will take it back if there isnt anything wrong with it


2gigs of extra Corsair ram in the other two slots it is then