Which RAM to purchase?

[Stegozor]

Hi everyone,

I wished to buy some RAM for a computer I offered to a friend (the
computer's pedigree: Asus A7V333 Motherboard (socket A), AMD Athlon XP
2000+ CPU).
According to the motherboard's user guide there are three sockets for
333 Mhz-PC2700 /266 Mhz-PC2100 / 200Mhz-PC1600 DDR DIMM modules. In the
shop where I was about to spend my money the salesman had non of these
modules, the closer he could find was a PC3200 and he didn't know
whether a PC3200 would fit my computer or not. So I prefer to ask the
question here (in case it wouldn't work, they don't take the stuff
back). Can I use only the mentioned memories, or would a more recent one
be backwards compatible?

TIA.

 

[kony]

Hi everyone,

I wished to buy some RAM for a computer I offered to a friend (the
computer's pedigree: Asus A7V333 Motherboard (socket A), AMD Athlon XP
2000+ CPU).
According to the motherboard's user guide there are three sockets for
333 Mhz-PC2700 /266 Mhz-PC2100 / 200Mhz-PC1600 DDR DIMM modules. In the
shop where I was about to spend my money the salesman had non of these
modules, the closer he could find was a PC3200 and he didn't know
whether a PC3200 would fit my computer or not. So I prefer to ask the
question here (in case it wouldn't work, they don't take the stuff
back). Can I use only the mentioned memories, or would a more recent one
be backwards compatible?

Yes PC3200 is backwards compatible, it would be better to
buy CAS2 or 2.5, not 3, then IF there is any stability
problem, try to regain stability by then raising the CAS
setting 0.5 higher (from 2 to 2.5 or from 2.5 to 3) in the
bios.

A7V333 has a problem dealing with lots of memory (all banks
used) at DDR333 (166MHz, PC2700 speed), with the Athlon
XP2000 it should be set to run synchronous to the FSB, at
DDR266, 133MHz memory bus. There is also a setting in the
bios, turbo or something like that, which should almost
always be disabled (but probably is disabled already).

After installing the memory or any bios changes related to
memory or FSB, always run Memtest86+ for several hours to
confirm stability.