Mixing DIMM's

[cheesymangav]

Noob question coming up!

In my rig at the moment i have 2 x 1gb Corsair value select PC2 5300 DDR2 dimms. I have just got hold of 4 x 1gb Hynix PC2700 DDR ECC DIMM's from work which were going to be scrapped cos' they are non-ROHS compliant (EU toxic material legislation), so my work can't use them now. Can these be used in my rig? Can you mix ECC and non ECC modules? Also, as far as i know if i do stick two of these dimms in, then all my memory will run at the slower speed, so is it really worth it? Most of the time you probably don't actually use more than 2 gigs of memory anyway, so will the drop in speed mean that performance would decrease in real life? Or will having 4 gb of memory be an advantage? I use my rig for gaming, music editing and a bit of coding (netbeans mostly), so I don't work with overly large files very often.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[jeff_2087]

Well seeing as your current RAM is DDR2 and the other stuff is DDR, getting the 184-pin DDR into a 240-pin DDR2 slot would prove very challenging and I don't recommend it.

Unless you have a motherboard that supports both DDR1 and DDR2, in which case you should consult the manual.

 

[cheesymangav]

😳

I knew there was something niggling at the back of mind telling me this would not work. The worst of it is, a may be a noob, but I actually did know that the pins were different. I'm off to self-mortify myself in shame. Thanks for the quick answer anyway dude.

 

[djcoolmasterx]

There are some motherboards like the asrock 775Dual-VSTA with both 184-pin DDR and 240-pin DDR2 slots but they say only to use one type of RAM at a time.

 

[Mondoman]

Also, ECC RAM is almost always also "registered", which won't work on almost all non-server MBs, which require "unbuffered" RAM.

 

[cheesymangav]

Thanks for the advice guys. I had a feeling they wouldn't work, but I just could not bring myself to throw away perfectly good hardware if there was any chance I could use it. Even now that I know they are useless to me, I still had trouble scrapping them!

 

[burn-e86]

also arn't DIMM's for laptops?

 

[mkaibear]

I wouldn't scrap them, they're still likely to be worth something to someone!