I was told to never mix PC133 and PC100 Ram

[george41407]

I was told to never mix PC133 and PC100 Ram together.
I just accidentally installed a 256 / PC133 and a 128 / PC100 strip in
the same computer and it booted right up without problem. When I
grabbed what I thought was the 128 / PC100 to put it in another
computer I realized I put in the wrong strip...... Oops.....
I thought they could not be used together. These are SDRAM.

Then I made another mistake (been one of those days). I pulled the
wrong strip before shutting off the computer. Oops, frozen computer.

Now they are all in the correct computers and everything is fine.

 

[spodosaurus]

I was told to never mix PC133 and PC100 Ram together.
I just accidentally installed a 256 / PC133 and a 128 / PC100 strip in
the same computer and it booted right up without problem. When I
grabbed what I thought was the 128 / PC100 to put it in another
computer I realized I put in the wrong strip...... Oops.....
I thought they could not be used together. These are SDRAM.

There's no issue mixing ram.

Then I made another mistake (been one of those days). I pulled the
wrong strip before shutting off the computer. Oops, frozen computer.

What the hell? You yank hardware from a running computer?

Now they are all in the correct computers and everything is fine.

You're very lucky. Run memtest86 on these systems and make sure you
haven't damaged the memory modules.

Ari


--
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Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow transplant. Please
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[Conor]

There's no issue mixing ram.

Oh ye of little experience...

 

[Timothy Daniels]

There's no issue mixing ram.

PC133 can replace PC100 in a system designed for PC100 -
the PC133 RAM will just run at the slower speed of PC100.
The reverse is not true.

*TimDaniels*

 

[spodosaurus]

Oh ye of little experience...

I've been mixing PC133 and PC100 from the outset without issue except on
some brand name motherboards. A blanket statement that 'you should never
mix ram of different FSB speeds' is incorrect in the majority of cases
(and certainly will not kill a computer like th poster implied...unlike
yanking modules out of a powered system). You chose to take a personal
swipe rather than address that blanket statement. What does that say
about you?

Ari


--
spammage trappage: remove the underscores to reply
Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow transplant. Please
volunteer to be a marrow donor and literally save someone's life:
http://www.abmdr.org.au/
http://www.marrow.org/

 

[Guest]

PC133 can replace PC100 in a system designed for PC100 -
the PC133 RAM will just run at the slower speed of PC100.
The reverse is not true.

Maybe. Most PC100 modules, especially those sold in the
last 6 or 7 years are rebadged PC133, and will run perfectly
fine at the higher speed. It's rebadged simply to maintain
OEM compatibility.

 

[Conor]

I've been mixing PC133 and PC100 from the outset without issue except on
some brand name motherboards. A blanket statement that 'you should never
mix ram of different FSB speeds' is incorrect in the majority of cases
(and certainly will not kill a computer like th poster implied...unlike
yanking modules out of a powered system). You chose to take a personal
swipe rather than address that blanket statement. What does that say
about you?

I've vastly more experience. It's not the different FSB's that's the
issue. But being as experienced as building them as I am, you'll know
that won't you?

 

[nemo]

Maybe. Most PC100 modules, especially those sold in the
last 6 or 7 years are rebadged PC133, and will run perfectly
fine at the higher speed. It's rebadged simply to maintain
OEM compatibility.

That is how all memories (and CPUs for that matter) achieve different
speeds. The chips are all the same. The modules are all the same.
When they test the chips they either meet the speed rating for the
faster parts, or they meet the speed ratings for the slower parts, or
they are discarded as scrap sometimes to show up in "bargain" memory I
am told. I have never tried to verify the "bargain" memory claims.

With older SD RAM the design was pretty solid for both the chips and
the boards and there were few incompatibility issues. With newer
memory types, the bus speeds are higher and board designs (mostly
mother boards rather than the memory modules) were not 100% correct.
So you ended up with situations where one brand of memory stick would
work and another would not or they wouldn't work together or you could
use the first bank or two but with not the last. Basically the DDR
memory system design was pretty poor in many respects. This led to a
lot of people making up rules like "don't mix the speeds" or "don't
mix the brands" and who knows what...

DDR2 is supposed to have fixed the system design issues, but I have no
first hand knowledge of that. But I bet you don't hear so many
"spooky" stories of things not working unless you follow all the made
up goofy rules. Actually, DDR runs with higher data rates and has the
potential of being worse. But I think they went to point to point
data connections which solves a lot of the signal integrity issues.
Someone please correct me if I am wrong about this.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

That is how all memories (and CPUs for that matter) achieve different
speeds. The chips are all the same. The modules are all the same.
When they test the chips they either meet the speed rating for the
faster parts, or they meet the speed ratings for the slower parts, or
they are discarded as scrap sometimes to show up in "bargain" memory I
am told. I have never tried to verify the "bargain" memory claims.

With older SD RAM the design was pretty solid for both the chips and
the boards and there were few incompatibility issues. With newer
memory types, the bus speeds are higher and board designs (mostly
mother boards rather than the memory modules) were not 100% correct.
So you ended up with situations where one brand of memory stick would
work and another would not or they wouldn't work together or you could
use the first bank or two but with not the last. Basically the DDR
memory system design was pretty poor in many respects. This led to a
lot of people making up rules like "don't mix the speeds" or "don't
mix the brands" and who knows what...

DDR2 is supposed to have fixed the system design issues, but I have no
first hand knowledge of that. But I bet you don't hear so many
"spooky" stories of things not working unless you follow all the made
up goofy rules. Actually, DDR runs with higher data rates and has the
potential of being worse. But I think they went to point to point
data connections which solves a lot of the signal integrity issues.
Someone please correct me if I am wrong about this.

Not having the time to experiment (i.e. "try 'n fry"), I choose to follow
the recommendations of companies like Crucial - which tell me that
I can count on PC133 working in place of PC100, but not the other
way around. As has been pointed out here, PC100 *may*/*might*/
*could* work in place of PC133, but why do the experiment to look
for what may be rare and intermittent data corruption when you don't
have to?

*TimDaniels*