will increasing ram damage motherboard

[emekadavid]

my system is a windows xp sp2, pentium III 1200MHZ with 256mb ram.
I wanted to increase the ram to 1gb but an engineer told me that this
would overclock the system and damage the motherboard. is this
possible?
if so, to what limit can i increase the ram?
TIA

 

[Sjouke Burry]

my system is a windows xp sp2, pentium III 1200MHZ with 256mb ram.
I wanted to increase the ram to 1gb but an engineer told me that this
would overclock the system and damage the motherboard. is this
possible?
if so, to what limit can i increase the ram?
TIA

Send the engineer back to study basic engineering.

 

[jerry]

my system is a windows xp sp2, pentium III 1200MHZ with 256mb ram. I
wanted to increase the ram to 1gb but an engineer told me that this
would overclock the system and damage the motherboard. is this possible?
if so, to what limit can i increase the ram? TIA

If you motherboard has the empty slots and can handle more than 256mb
then yes you can increase the amount of ram. You do have to use the
correct speed and use the correct modules.
If you go to crucial.com it will do a free scan of your system and tell
you the speed and type of module you have to use. There is obligation to
buy the ram from them and they are malware free.
The other solution is to read (download) the motherboard manual and see
what it says.
Jerry

 

[philo]

Send the engineer back to study basic engineering.

Yep

the so call engineer is an idiot.

adding ram should give you a nice performance boost

 

[John Doe]

my system is a windows xp sp2, pentium III 1200MHZ with 256mb
ram. I wanted to increase the ram to 1gb but an engineer told me
that this would overclock the system and damage the motherboard.
is this possible? if so, to what limit can i increase the ram?
TIA

You might be misinterpreting what was said. If your motherboard
already has two sticks/modules, he could have been talking about
the fact that some motherboards have trouble with four sticks of
memory.

 

[Paul]

You might be misinterpreting what was said. If your motherboard
already has two sticks/modules, he could have been talking about
the fact that some motherboards have trouble with four sticks of
memory.

I can give an example of that, on my very own computer with
P2B-S motherboard, 440BX chipset, and Celeron (Tualatin) 1100MHz.

It has room for four sticks of RAM. The maximum capacity of
each slot is 256MB. In theory, you're supposed to be able to
install four sticks of 256MB for a total of 1024MB. I tried
that, and the computer crashed. It's a bug in the design
of the motherboard. With two sticks installed, it's perfectly
stable (it ran Prime95 all day without error). With three or
four sticks, it'll crash in about ten minutes. The unstable
part of the machine ends up being the video card (I think it's
AGP related). The more graphic update activity, the sooner it crashes.
I tested with two completely different OSes, and saw the exact
same instability.

Not all 440BX based computers are like that. And it has
nothing to do with "overclocking".

The Crucial site, would recommend 4 * 256MB for my motherboard,
but due to the design bug, it should really only recommend
2 * 256MB. (The RAM was actually bought from Crucial.)
Other 440BX motherboards may be perfectly happy with
all four installed.

On the web, I can find references to what is called the
"Photoshop Bug" for 440BX motherboards. It has to do with
not enough bypass capacitance on the bus termination voltage
supply. But the crashes I was experiencing, weren't the
same as the Photoshop bug. Mine was something else. The
Photoshop bug shows up mainly, while using Photoshop
(long runs of data reads or writes to RAM, with long
sequences of the same data value, causes a shift in the
termination voltage because the capacitor isn't big enough
to prevent the shift). Some people solved the Photoshop bug,
by soldering a capacitor to their motherboard.

If the chipset was something else, the situation could be
entirely different. And perhaps not so prone to problems.

Paul

 

[Paul]

my system is a windows xp sp2, pentium III 1200MHZ with 256mb ram.
I wanted to increase the ram to 1gb but an engineer told me that this
would overclock the system and damage the motherboard. is this
possible?
if so, to what limit can i increase the ram?
TIA

Please give some more details about the computer. Like
what motherboard it uses. Either list computer make and
model number, or list motherboard make and model number.
You'd need that information anyway, to look up what
RAM your motherboard takes, on the Crucial.com site.

Paul

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If you motherboard has the empty slots and can handle more than 256mb
then yes you can increase the amount of ram. You do have to use the
correct speed and use the correct modules.
If you go to crucial.com it will do a free scan of your system and tell
you the speed and type of module you have to use. There is obligation to
buy the ram from them and they are malware free.
The other solution is to read (download) the motherboard manual and see
what it says.
Jerry

Typo alert!

There is *NO* obligation to buy the ram from them

 

[Loren Pechtel]

my system is a windows xp sp2, pentium III 1200MHZ with 256mb ram.
I wanted to increase the ram to 1gb but an engineer told me that this
would overclock the system and damage the motherboard. is this
possible?
if so, to what limit can i increase the ram?
TIA

That engineer is bonkers.

You can increase the ram to whatever the board supports and that you
can get the chips for--memory for a P-III might be hard to find. I
don't recall what they wanted back then.

Note that you must get the type of RAM it expects and you can't use
chips larger than the board is designed for--maybe you just get the
design limits, maybe you get nothing at all.

If you're replacing all of the memory you can go with faster memory
without problem--you won't get the faster speed but it will work.
(Memory speed is the maximum it will operate at, the board sets the
actual speed. Your Yugo isn't going to go zooming off because you
passed a "Speed Limit 300 mph" sign.)

I would try running Crucial's upgrade program--it looks at your board
and almost always tells you exactly what you can use. Of course it
links to memory for sale on their site but you don't have to buy from
them.

 

[Sjouke Burry]

Typo alert!

There is *NO* obligation to buy the ram from them

Some people might feel a moral obligation after their polite
assistance....

 

[John Doe]

Not all 440BX based computers are like that. And it has nothing
to do with "overclocking".

The original poster's description is too obscure/weird to assume
"overclocking" is really what the "engineer" was talking about.

 

[Michael Black]

I can never understand why anyone posts ridiculous questions like
this. Do they get some satisfaction from the number of responses?

A simple Google search would give answers. Even giving them the
benefit of the doubt and accept they have access to knowledgeable
people on Newsgroups I still doubt the genuineness of this question.
This is an old set up so I can't believe that an "engineer" would
bother to tell him something so silly - more like "buy a newer
system".

No, in this case, the question does read like "everyman".

"Engineer" may not be the "expert's" title, it may have been bestowed on
the person by the poster. Or, the "engineer" isn't but uses that title,
since he's dealing with the public that generally doesn't know better.

"Overclock" could be explained by garbling between what the "expert" said
and what the poster remembers. The "expert" explained it, but by the time
the poster posts, they can't remember what was said (whether or not there
was a proper explanation), so as they try to remember, some other term
pops into their head. If they don't know that much about computers, they
may have heard the term but not the meaning, and so they can't realize
the term can't be what the "engineer" said.

I see ambiguous explanations all the time, companies not wanting to be
bothered with a lot of extra questions, so they come up with some simple
and broad explanation to limit the questions. "Works with Windows and
Mac" takes care of most people, but it sure doesn't indicate whether one
has to have WIndows or a Mac, or if it just means they don't want to deal
with Linux.

If you have anticipated that a poster does know what they are talking
about, then of course you can dismiss the post as a troll. But it's a
different world out there, there are people too afraid of even trying to
fix their kitchen faucet to pay any attention, so they can't talk in the
same place or words as someone who has.

Michael

 

[DevilsPGD]

I think that it is a very charitable reaction to give someone the
benefit of the doubt.

There's a ton of this on IRC (freenode's ##hardware), usually in the
form of "Someone told me that <insert something technically ignorant
here>" or "I read that..." or similar.

Some are trolling, but many (or maybe even most) are just confused
wanna-be geeks that were bamboozled by techno babble and honestly need
assistance.

The response or lack of it is quite often an indicator of whether the
original poster is really genuine.

Indeed. However, it's difficult to decide whether or not to help
someone based on their responsiveness before you've given them something
to which they might respond.