My motherboard can take memory up to PC2100 DDR. I have installed a 512Mb
chip. I would like to add more memory. But I don't want to waste money if I
can't use this memory in my next motherboard.
So:
1. Can I install faster memory (PC2700?) into my mobo?
2. If not, can I use my slower (PC2100) memory in my next mobo?
3. If so, will this slower memory (in my next mobo) greatly harm
performance?
If I can't install faster memory in my current system and can't transfer my
memory to my new mobo then I'll just wait to I upgrade before buying more
memory.
Cheers.
Bobby
I read ahead and saw that your chipset is KT266A...
1. Yes, PC2770 (or even better, PC3200-3500) is backwards compatible with
your board. As in any other situation it would be more likely to work in
the future (boards) if it's a good name-brand module, not low-end/generic.
Even so there's no guarantee about future compatibility, even Crucial had
problems getting their offerings to work when certain chipsets (nForce)
arrived.
2. It depends on what your next mobo is, but more significant, the spec'd
FSB speed of the next CPU. Generally you don't want to run the memory bus
at slower speed than the FSB, as it will significantly hurt performance...
so, reusing the PC2100 memory would, at best, limit your use to CPUs
having a max FSB of DDR333 (166MHz clock rate), while today's high-end
chips already use DDR400. There is no good reason to buy PC2100 memory
today unless you found a local special w/rebate that made it nearly free
after the rebate, so it's not such a $ loss to retire the memory when the
motherboard/CPU/etc is upgraded later.
3. Yes it's hurt performance if the CPU FSB was higher than the memory
bus, though if the jobs you were running exceeded the amount of physical
memory installed then adding a slower module and reducing the memory bus
clock speed (given constraints mentioned above, at most the CPU FSB could
be DDR333 and memory bus at asynchronous "-33" (-DDR66), which is the
DDR266 rate of the spec'd PC2100 memory.) would be better than using
virtual memory, swap/page file on the hard drive.
In other words, buy PC3200 memory... it's currently the best price point
with reasonable future potential... though "future" is pretty vague, if
you were contemplating upgrading the motherboard in the next few months
anyway (to an Athlon platform) you might do that now, it'd be backwards
compatible with your present CPU and memory for the time being.
