Can you mix brands of RAM in a system? Help!

[PizzaDude]

I have a ECS K7S5A mobo with 2 DDR RAM slots. Right now I have 2 x 256mb pc2100 sticks of Crucial Ram. I was wondering if I sold 1 of them and bought a Kingston stick of 512mb pc2100 DDR if it would work/run ok? Does it depend on the motherboard or...? In my old computer (celeron 500) i added soem memory to it later, and I don't think it was the same brand, just as a note.

 

[Shooters]

You really shouldn't have any problems, but some motherboards can be picky.

 

[Adul]

most are fine as long has the ram is of good quality. but once ina while there is an issue.

 

[Colt45]

should work fine.

just dont mix DDR and SDR

 

[MistaTastyCakes]

Mixed brand don't matter usually, unless ya buy crappy brands.
Kingston + Crucial should work just fine. Why ya need 768mb's though?

 

[PizzaDude]

Why not? It can't hurt in today's world of gaming.

 

[CubicZirconia]

I'd max my system out on ram if I had the money, but I doubt going over 512 MB would really do anything. I'd be suprised if you noticed any difference in games with 768 mb ram as opposed to 512.

 

[silent tone]

I have an asus with a kt133 chipset, kingston pc150 BGA SDRAM doesn't play well with mushkin pc133 value SDRAM.
But you usually won't have problems.

 

[Zukatah]

Only problems I've seen is with generic RAM.

 

[PizzaDude]

Yea, but in the future... Plus, things load faster too. My next upgrade is a Ti4200 anyways, I just noticed the really good price of the ram. Thanks for the info guys.

 

[StattlichPassat]

If you're building a new system, no reason to do so, but if you're upgrading it's acceptable. I run 256MB of Crucial and 256MB of Micron- no problems, runs great. Like the other posts say; just use high quality RAM and you'll be fine.

 

[Zakule]

Stick with the 2x 256MB's of Crucial. Mixing brands usually doesn't cause a problem, but I've seen instances where it does.

I've dealt with a lot of different memory modules over the past 3 years and 512MB dimms in general are more problematic then 256MB dimms. As with any memory technology, the more put onto one dimm the more difficult it is to engineer so it makes sense that it would be more prone to quirkiness.

Games that use a huge cache like Baldur's Gate II or Sacrifice will load between areas more quickly since the game will be able to store more in memory, but most games won't be make use of the extra memory and you may end up dealing with side effects, so why risk it? Unless you like trouble shooting your system more than gaming on it, it would be unwise to tempt fate when you're system has more than enough memory now.