- Feb 15, 2008
- 6
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- 18,510
I was working for the Systems Department at my workplace and was going to replace the ram sticks in some Dell GX270s on Wednesday when I noticed my supervisor was doing something odd. She was not just upgrading the ram sticks, from 512mb to 1 GB, but adding the new sticks into the free ram slots in the computer, keeping the old ones in. I stopped her before she plugged the computer back in and did a few checks.
The old ram sticks were 2x256mb, PC2700, at 166MHz. The new sticks, directly from Dell, were 2x512mb, PC3200, at 400 MHz (which seems a little high for the stick itself yet that was what it said on the stickers). Previously I had done research on ram, their timings and frequency, seeing as I wanted to get my timings right on my pc. I remember reading that not only are different sizes of ram a bad idea to pair up, but different companies, and especially different timings. Thus I was concerned about putting those new sticks in with the old sticks, even if they were in different paired slots.
Long story short, I went up the Chain of Command and told a few supervisors my concern. In the end, they took my recommendation and next time we will replace the old sticks with the new. My question is would it really have made that much of a difference? Would the computer have run? Would there have been problems starting XP? Would there have been problems further on down the road?
The old ram sticks were 2x256mb, PC2700, at 166MHz. The new sticks, directly from Dell, were 2x512mb, PC3200, at 400 MHz (which seems a little high for the stick itself yet that was what it said on the stickers). Previously I had done research on ram, their timings and frequency, seeing as I wanted to get my timings right on my pc. I remember reading that not only are different sizes of ram a bad idea to pair up, but different companies, and especially different timings. Thus I was concerned about putting those new sticks in with the old sticks, even if they were in different paired slots.
Long story short, I went up the Chain of Command and told a few supervisors my concern. In the end, they took my recommendation and next time we will replace the old sticks with the new. My question is would it really have made that much of a difference? Would the computer have run? Would there have been problems starting XP? Would there have been problems further on down the road?
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