best Ram?

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best Ram?

im looking into upgrading my PC's ram from 512 to either 1gb or 2 gb. either way i only want to buy "1gb" sticks. i need PC2700 ram. My main concern is memory errors. i dont know what is the best brand out there, ive seen so many and they all get GOOD/BAD reviews. my question is the ones that gave them bad reviews maybe didnt know what they were doing? who knows. any input would be great. i have an XFX KT400ANB with an athlon 1800XP over clocked to 1916mhz. thats about a 400 mhz jump. either way i have the speed i need with the system, i just want it more smooth.. when browing a ton of windows it has to keep hitting the page file, which is already on another drive seperate and dedicated.

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oops, i might also add i need

oops, i might also add i need some good PC133 for my G4 as well... looking for 256mb sticks for that...

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Personally I buy my ram from

Personally I buy my ram from crucial.com. You will pay more for it but they do have a reputation for having a quality product. The other reason I like them is they have a lifetime and I know they will still around a few years from now.

The main thing is to buy from a reputable retailer and to assume that all RAM in bad. After you install it run a program like memtest86 on it and let it run overnight. If it comes back clean then I will trust that it is good.

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well im running that program

well im running that program as we speak. we'll see how it goes.... the specs for cache on cpu are horrible for my laptop, its way better on my athlon. no wonder these things just arent that powerfull..

edit: test as has gone through 3 passes so far no problems. im guessing its good. ill let it run while im gone for the day. i have the fans all the way up so it shouldnt over heat, if it does it will shut it self down.

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Most of it's pretty good. Wa

Most of it's pretty good. Watch out for extremely cheap ram that only works with certain chipsets and avoid all the overclocker crap memory with fancy LED's and heatsinks. I personally like Samsung and Micron memory. Companies like Kingston and corsair don't actually make RAM, then just buy other people's parts and solder to their boards, so you never know what you are going to get. Infineon is pretty good too.

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samsung is alot of the ram th

samsung is alot of the ram that comes in apple computers is it not? i think my g4 and g3 had some in them when i got them each..

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Ditto on the Kingston and Cor

Ditto on the Kingston and Corsair. Their memory seems to be all over the place in my experience. Infineon has been very consistent for me, and the newer Samsung.

Jon
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FWIW you should run your RAm

FWIW you should run your RAM test programs with the cache turned off. Otherwise you are testing the cache instead of the RAM. Wink If you have a really good RAM tester, it'll notice the cache and setup the test to cause cache misses to get to the RAM, but it's better to force the cache off yourself. Sure, it'll run slower, but it will really be testing the RAM. Cache makes such a huge speed difference it's suprising people don't rally for more. I'd certainly like a slower CPU with massive cache over a faster CPU with anemic cache. The slower one will run from cache more often, and will likely be faster than the speedier CPU because the fater one will be having to wait for RAM access much more often.

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iMac Cache

Jon, your points about cache are interesting. I've always wondered why the caches on new iMacs are so small. The iMacs and eMacs are all souped up on everything except the cache. Why is that?

Jon
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Cache eats transistors. IIRC

Cache eats transistors. IIRC a basic memory cell of SRAM uses a 6 transistor setup per bit. So if you make a whole MB of cache you need to use 1024x1024x8 (8,388,608) bits. That uses 50,331,648 transistors for just the bits, not including control circuitry. With the coming move to 65nm and 45nm tech from Intel, they show significant leaps in cache size due to the denser packing they can do on a die. The article I linked in another post to Tom's Hardware and their report on the Intel roadmap complains about a loss of clock speed with the move to the new processes, but seem to ignore the massive gains the CPUs will get with the larger cache. That's the old Intel stance - Mhz or Bust! The new Intel stance is efficiency. That's why Merom is starting life as a mobile CPU and then being transitioned up to desktop and enterprise levels. I'm all for ignoring GHz ranks, and getting real performance benchmarks, but those all depend on the tuning of a system. GHz is just an easy copout for the marketing drones, IMHO. Cache hit percentages, now that's something geeks should care about. If you aren't running from cahce, you can only runs as fast as the RAM. If you stuck a 1.8GHZ CPU on a board with no cache and some PC-400 RAM it would most likely do about the same as a 3.6GHz CPU in the same board with no cache either. A CPU can only work as fast as you can throw data at it.

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I havnt bought any DDR ram ye

I havnt bought any DDR ram yet, though I got a 256mb crucial and i scrounged my buddys old collection of computers and managed to get a total of 704mb in my G4 and im using the (3) 64 mb samsung memory chips i have in my AIO. both machines seem pretty stable now. i let my AIO run all night long with a game in a demo mode (marathon 2) and it was still running fine when i woke up. im guessing its ok. as far as the G4 goes, its always had some quirky behaveor, but it runs and i dont think its crashed yet. its a Yikes! machine so im not expecting the world from it, but atleast it runs. linux hates my hard drive cuz sectors 16-18 are bad, and i cant seem to get it past that. ive tried all kinds of things to fake it out and skip them but it keeps having errors during install and wont continue. os9 and osx seem fine on it. so until i get another hd osx is staying on that one. i was trying to use fedora core because i found wireless drivers for my USB adapter and wanted to see how well it works.

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I have used generic and Kenni

I have used generic and Kenningston with no problem.. I dont thing the name really matters.. Just the Warrenty...

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i have plenty of ram that doe

i have plenty of ram that doesnt work in my macs, i get the breaking glass sound when ever that happens or the screen wont come on at all...

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It's the chips, not the card manufacturer's name

Find two Kingston ram sticks, labelled identically, same product number, designated for the same machines, and then look at the chips used on each, and you'll often find completely different chip manufacturers of very different quality reputations, so the two memory cards are not the same. When buying RAM it's always smart to check the chips.

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i just reciently got a bad stick of memory

when i put the memory in my pismo, I was getting random freezes and lines on the screen. So, you do need to beware of no-name memory, or where you get it from. My suggestion it to go with name-brand memory like pny or corsair (preferably)

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i dunno if its ram or what bu

i dunno if its ram or what but my PC just started acting up like there is no tommorow. seriously down out OUTKAST. its hanging left and right and no same situation which leads me to believe its not a software thing. the mouse and everything will just stop. i think my ps could be the cause. who knows. i cleaned everything inside, took everything out and re seated all. we'll see if it still happens. i dont think its cuz it was over clocked because i downed it and it still crashed 3 times in a row after that.

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PICKY PICKY

I have found out my G4 is very very very picky about the ram it uses. if somthing isnt right it wont chime, and if it boots with no chime half the time will crash randomly, or just go really slow. so basically i took out all the ram and slowly tested the stuff i have. it seems to really haul with a 256 from crucial and a 128 from PNY. im getting imports with itunes that are close to my athlon in speed. generally good behavior in osx as well. i was starting to think this machine was dying on me like my last one. my g3 and m g4 have 384mb ram and seem to be happy with whats in them Smile i guess that just because i have spare ram doesnt mean i have to use it all Smile

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RAM

This thread is all over the place...
Regarding Macs,
Download and run " DIMM FIRST AID " to see if it is 8 ns RAM.
Most 64MB RAM was 'slow' 10 ns. Poor performance in OS9 -
and prior. No Good at all for any version of OSX.
Probably the same results for Windoze but I refuse to go there!
Regards,
Dave

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8ns--who says?

Well, it just goes to show. I've got three matching sticks of PC100 256mb SDRAM that Dimm First Aid says is CL2 10ns (all three have the same Mitsubishi chips) that perform just wonderfully in OSX, and if I remember correctly back when I was testing all my SDRAM in my B&W with SpeedRun, they outperformed some Kingston PC133 CL3 8ns 256mb sticks. I begin to wonder if that 8ns recommendation is not some myth cooked up by someone along the way that we've all gotten in the habit of believing.

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Jumpy thread

sorry i have adhd in the worst way. my thoughts jump around alot.

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At work, I monitor a PC purch

At work, I monitor a PC purchasing contract where the supplier exclusively uses Samsung DIMMs. Since July, we've purchased ~500 PCs (ie >1000 DIMMs) and ~2000 PCs since the contract began. From the supplier's service logs, I know that there have been a tiny number of individual failures but no failure pattern. RAM failure accounts for a much smaller proportion of problems than hard disks or power supplies, for example. I also manage our Windows deployment processes so I'm the first person to hear about hardware problems during Windows installation -- Windows hardware setup during installation (like Mac OS X) is pretty effective at identifying questionable hardware. So I like Samsung RAM.

For upgrades, we use Crucial. I can recall an odd failure but no case when the RAM itself was incompatible with the PC. This includes upgrades to Intel-branded motherboards which can be very picky. Note that Crucial is the company that sells RAM modules manufactured by Micron to end-users. Crucial == Micron.

I note that the original poster is proposing to replace existing RAM, which is best practice, rather than add to it. For desktop PCs, I try to ensure that pairs or banks are matched whenever possible, but I don't get too obsessive about it. Be realistic and try unmatched pairs/banks if your budget is tight. Most of the time, 3 * 256MB unmatched RAM will deliver better performance and equal reliability to 2 * 256MB matched RAM. For servers and mission critical desktops, I will always stick to the manufacturer's rules.

Phil

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from now on im not messing ar

from now on im not messing around when it comes to buying ram. this is all stuff i had kicking around and i had to weed through it all to find out which worked with what and so forth... i think ive come to a conclusion.

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Under windows

It always seems after you install more ram u need to reinstall your OS something about it won't function until you do a repair install.

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Re: Under windows

It always seems after you install more ram u need to reinstall your OS something about it won't function until you do a repair install.

You can swap RAM in and out of a Windows machine all you want without having to touch the OS.

If you were to swap the motherboard to one of a different model, however, then you'll need to reinstall.

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