Will AMD chips take any RAM?

[technossomy]

Before being conned by my local hardware suppliers, can I stick in any RAM onto a Compaq mobo with AMD K6-2 @ 550MHz? I have one slot free and 64MB RAM is present. Can I mix SDRAM with DDRAM? Is it better to have RAM from one manufacturer only? Is there any preference (in terms of overall performance) in placing the higher RAM in slot 1 or 2? And finally, perhaps somewhat off topic, is there any relation between the condition of the CMOS battery and overall performance?

Thanks in advance

Tech

[hockey man]

For RAM to work it has to be the same type of RAM. Depending on the MOBO, you can put various speeds in, however, they will all run at the slowest speed. You can mix and match speeds, manufacturers, and size modules as long as the MOBO supports them. So, the real question is what MOBO do you have? I don't belive there is any advantage/disadvantages to placing RAM in certain slots. However, if your MOBO supports Dual Channel RAM you will want to get similar sticks (By size and speed) and put them in the appropriate slots. Go over to either crucial.com or kingston.com and plug your pc in and tell us what it finds. You can get better prices else were, but that will tell us what type of RAM you have. With the CMOS battery, I'm not sure if that would actually affect running performance. However, it does affect start-up.

[technossomy]

Thanks for your response, hockey man. In the meantime I have replaced the CMOS battery and there is a substantial performance improvement! It is about 3 times as fast, both in file management tasks (standalone) as well as in page rendering (online). The clock was already 40 minutes behind, so it was about time this piece of hardware was replaced. As regards your other pointers I will try them. My first rudimentary research tells me that RAM is available for far lower prices and your suggestion of having both sticks as similar as possible is a good one.

Tech

[hockey man]

I would highly recommend any Crucial, Kingston, or Corsair RAM. It is great stuff, and it comes with great warranties.

[rond36]

Thanks for your response, hockey man. In the meantime I have replaced the CMOS battery and there is a substantial performance improvement! It is about 3 times as fast, both in file management tasks (standalone) as well as in page rendering (online). The clock was already 40 minutes behind, so it was about time this piece of hardware was replaced. As regards your other pointers I will try them. My first rudimentary research tells me that RAM is available for far lower prices and your suggestion of having both sticks as similar as possible is a good one.

Tech


The CMOS battery has nothing to do with performance! The sole purpose of the CMOS battery is to supply the CMOS chip with power while the PC is turned off. The CMOS chip stores BIOS settings that are used during the boot process. If the battery goes dead your BIOS settings will be lost each time the PC is turned off and will need to be reset on each boot.

Before buying RAM find out what kind your motherboard needs.

[saphalline]

PC100 or PC133 SDRAM. The K6-2 is before hockey man's time, so he doesn't automatically know what type of RAM goes in there. ;) And no, there's no dual-channel RAM for that. :p Dual-channel RAM didn't start until the P4 starting creeping over 2 GHz, so that was a good couple of years past the K6-2.

Get a stick of 128MB PC133 (or more capacity if you can afford it). Or better yet, get two sticks of 128MB and toss that 64MB stick. K6-2 systems were notorious for being saddled with crappy RAM (because they were "value" systems). I wouldn't recommend mixing good RAM with crappy RAM. As long as you stick to RAM manufacturers like hockey man listed, you'll get good RAM.

[pangea33]

It might not be a bad idea to tell us what OS you're using, and the general type of applications you want to run. Some apps are much more memory intensive than others. If you can find two 128 meg sticks of PC133 ram for a decent price, you'll be happy that you made the investment.

Having enough ram in your system to minimize pagefile use makes such a huge difference. I added 512 megs to my dinosaur, and the difference was pretty astonishing.

[technossomy]

Thanks for your responses.

Pangea33, I will try to obtain some 128MB sticks. On your other question, it is the computer which should go in the living room of the owner and is supposed to be used as a regular home computer: streaming audio/video, chatting/emailing, text processing, no gaming. The owner is aware that performance characteristics are almost a decade old, but he is fine with that after a demo of what the machine still can do.

Thanks again


Tech

[hockey man]

Check this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820133012) out.


The K6-2 is before hockey man's time, so he doesn't automatically know what type of RAM goes in there. ;)

Hey! stop picking on us younger folks! :p Yeh, I'm not familiar with any hardware that is basically 4+ years old. . .I didn't care back them. . .but then Saphalline's knowledge lurered me into falling into the hardware abyss. My bro thinks I'm losing my sanity. . .I think it is rather facinating!

[jahajazz]

I didn't know you could buy SDRAM new anymore :p .

[saphalline]

Yep! You can sometimes even buy EDO/FPM RAM new, as well. But the old invidual DRAM chips are all used these days. ;)