Dells fussy about memory?

[WildW]

I have an old Dell Optiplex GX620 that I'm turning into a media centre. It came with 512MB of DDR2 (I believe PC2-5300) and I'd like to upgrade it. . .but the voice in the back of my head says "It's a Dell - any memory you buy might not work"

Is this nonsense? I've upgraded Dells a couple of times before, and I have tried to transplant known-good DDR from another machine to a Dell with failure as a result. Then again, other times it's been fine.

Is this an occasional strangeness, or is this kind of thing normal? If there is a special kind of magic Dell memory to push you to buy expensive approved upgrades, how are they actually different from regular ram?

 

[Emulex]

nonsense for sure. unless the bios is set to override the SPD which just isn't wise. throw in some generic ddr2-800 and it should be fine.

 

[WildW]

I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me to pull some ram from my desktop and just try it. . . not thinking right today 😛 Mushkin DDR2-1000 worked fine (although apparently the Dell is max 533MHz. lol)

So I shall buy some regular ram and report back when it inexplicably fails to work.

 

[Yellowbeard]

Just make sure you buy RAM that meets JEDEC spec for 533 and you'll be fine. The typical issue with Dells and other OEM systems is the lack of options in BIOS to adjust memory voltage so you need to be sure to get memory that will run at 1.8v.

 

[RebateMonger]

I've never had any problem using good-quality memory in Dells. Most (all?) Dells don't support voltage or other memory adjustments, so you won't want to put 2.2 Volt memory in one. Given a choice, I normally buy "standard" (non-overclocked) Crucial memory and have had zero problems in the many Dells I've dealt with.