[Help] RAM Upgrades

[kjc733]

Ok, so I build aircraft for a living and starships as a hobby, and yet I've never upgraded a PC . Mostly because I tend to run laptops and the main problem with my last one was that the screen started to die.

Anyways, my current mesh machine is an old Packard Bell running XP on a Pentium 4 with 512mb RAM. As you may have picked up from my thread, I've had a few issues with it of late and figured it was the RAM dying on me. I managed to acquire a few sticks of 1Gb RAM and today finally found the time to crack open the case...

First thing I noticed, my PC was full of cobwebs. So I cleaned that out. Next thing, despite all I've been told in the past, there was only one stick of RAM in the box (I had assumed it'd be a pair of 256mb as the PC has been erroneously reporting it only has 256MB RAM). However there were two slots, so I pulled out the stick and replaced it with my new one - or rather tried to, it didn't fit.

On further investigation, it seems that my PC runs DDR RAM (yes, that's DDR1) whereas the sticks I have are DDR2 - d'oh. So I reseated the original and fired it up and yes, thankfully, it still works (and reports 512MB for now).

Anyway, this means I'll need to shop around a bit for some old DDR1 RAM. Looking on Amazon there are a few out there, but I'm not all that familiar with RAM specs. This is what was in the box:

Samsung Korea 0343C
PC 2700U-25331-B2
M368L6423DTM-CB3
512MB DDR PC2700 CL2.5

Now looking around this means that its 512MB (obviously), 184 pin, 333MHz, CL2.5.
I'm not really sure what the CL2.5 means, but looking on the interweb all the DDR I can find is CL3. So I guess my question in this long winded post is what is the significance of CL2.5 vs CL3 and would it make a difference if I replaced the original stick with a pair of 1GB DDR 333MHz but at CL3?

Any other comments would be welcome as I'm one of these people who have never really investigated the mysteries of the PC (I actually thought these computer things would never catch on, at age 10 my school had access to three Acorns and a single Windows 95 PC that we weren't allowed to touch).

 

[CABAL]

CL is CAS Latency. From Wikipedia:

Column Access Strobe (CAS) latency, or CL, is the delay time between the moment a memory controller tells the memory module to access a particular memory column on a RAM module, and the moment the data from the given array location is available on the module's output pins.

In general, the lower the CL, the better.

You're not going to get better than 2.5 on DDR1. According to another forum, divide the CL by the clock speed to get the response time. The lower the value the better, for that. In this instance, the 368MHz CL2.5 is going to be faster than the 333MHz CL3 by about 30%. There's not much DDR1 in production anymore, so you may need to get 333MHz CL3 sticks unless you're willing to pay potentially double. Having much more RAM will mitigate the speed difference since it won't be swapping things in and out as much, though.

Another thing to note is that since you're using a 32-bit operating system, you will be limited to 4GB usable RAM.

I would recommend using a dedicated PC parts site, like Newegg, instead of Amazon. They'll have a much more varied selection and will let you more easily refine your search. I've sent you a PM with an example.

 

[kjc733]

Thank you for the info, that's cleared things up a bit. I'll take a look at that site.

As for RAM limits, seeing that I've been running fine with 512mb (well, up to about 70k polies) I think 2GB will be fine.