Navigating the Memory Upgrade Jungle

Mushkin Advisor

Mushkin offers a unique tool that makes memory upgrades a snap, assuming a few conditions are true. You must access the tool using the system you’re trying to upgrade, and it must be able to use ActiveX controls.

As it happens, the Dell Dimension 4600 we were trying to upgrade sits in another office, and is protected against such potential vulnerabilities as ActiveX controls anyway, so we used a different system. It had a Soyo P4I875P Dragon 2 v1.0 motherboard running a Celeron D 2.13 GHz CPU (overclocked to 3.20 GHz at FSB800), and was already configured with two Corsair PC4000 DDR DIMMs, leaving two slots open for upgrades.

Mushkin shows the key system configuration, including the 875P chipset, and indicates that it is best to use PC3700. What it doesn’t provide is the rated speed or latency value of the modules listed. They also tried to sell us a single module to put into our dual-channel configuration.

The shopping cart shows the two modules we chose based on our knowledge of the system. There remains no further information about the modules we are about to purchase, except that the SKU is 999121 (a part number that returns no results using Mushkin’s search engine.)

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.