Kingston DDR2, Micron / Elpida chips, dual channel compatibility

[me]

Hello,

I have 1 stick of Kingston KVR533D2N4/512 DDR2 on an Asus M2NPV-MX, and
wanted to buy another one, to run them together in dual channel mode.
However, the stick I have is about 2 years old and uses Micron D9DCN CB-37E
chips. The new sticks in the shops use Elpida E5108AJBG chips.
Can anyone tell me with some certainty whether these will be compatible?
Their respective spec sheets both say "16M words x 8 bits x 4 banks, 60-ball
FBGA, 1.8V, 1KB page size, row A0-13, column A0-9, burst length 4/8, CL
4/5/6, refresh cycles: 8192/64ms" (in fact, I can't really find any
difference), but is that enough to ensure compatibility?

Thanks in advance!

Marc.

 

[Dave]

Hello,

I have 1 stick of Kingston KVR533D2N4/512 DDR2 on an Asus M2NPV-MX, and
wanted to buy another one, to run them together in dual channel mode.
However, the stick I have is about 2 years old and uses Micron D9DCN CB-37E
chips. The new sticks in the shops use Elpida E5108AJBG chips.
Can anyone tell me with some certainty whether these will be compatible?
Their respective spec sheets both say "16M words x 8 bits x 4 banks, 60-ball
FBGA, 1.8V, 1KB page size, row A0-13, column A0-9, burst length 4/8, CL
4/5/6, refresh cycles: 8192/64ms" (in fact, I can't really find any
difference), but is that enough to ensure compatibility?

Thanks in advance!

Marc.

OK, there is a widely held myth that dual channel requires identical chips.
Nope, you can mix and match chips, mix and match brands. What you can't
change is the specifications as far as geometry and timings goes. If you
found a non-kingston brand with same specifications, even that would work.

In any case, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. Dual channel is a
gimmick at best, the performance does not improve significantly beyond the
performance improvement that you will get simply by adding MORE total RAM.
So in the highly unlikely event it didn't work in dual channel mode, run it
in single channel mode. -Dave

 

[me]

Thanks for replying. (and other people too, btw!)

(...)
So in the highly unlikely event it didn't work in dual channel mode, run
it
in single channel mode. -Dave

That's why I wanted to be sure it would work in dual channel mode: if I
understand the M2NPV-MX manual correctly, there's no way to tell it to use
single or dual channel, you can only either use one memory stick in single
channel mode, or pairs in dual channel mode. I see no BIOS setting or
hardware switch to run 2 or 4 sticks in single channel mode.

Anyway, I'll just buy a stick and see how it goes. Btw, this is for a budget
computer my father uses for e-mail and Word and stuff. I only wanted to
upgrade it now because the price has dropped to 11 euros for a 512MB stick,
and the price for 256MB has already started to rise again, so the 512MB's
are probably near their lowest point, and I just thought it'd be silly not
to buy one at that price.

Regards,

Marc.