Will my RAM work when I upgrade to an Athlon?

[Webgod]

Does anyone have a pointer to an article on RAM on Athlons? I know Athlon boards are more particular about RAM, but I don't recall reading what the actual issue was. I know Pricewatch has Athlon RAM that's more expensive.

I was thinking of stepping up to an Abit KX133 system pretty soon, but I really shouldn't if my RAM won't work with it! I have 128MB of generic 10ns PC66/100 RAM with NEC chips, and I have another 128MB of PNY (retail brand) PC100 8ns RAM with Infineon chips. Both are working fine in my BH6...

Thanks

 

[Klosters]

Athlon systems are choosy about Ram, but in a different way than PIII boxes. AFAIK, Infineon and Mosel Vitalic "chipped" Dimms are the best for K7's.

 

[Insane3D]

I would reccomend the KA7 or KA7-100 when you buy the mobo. It comes with a special memory buffer that is not found on any other Athlon mobo. I am using Generic PC-100 and it is running just fine at Cas2/Turbo. My memory is running at 119mhz, which is pretty good for PC-100. I can't speak for other Athlon mobo's, but I have not found the KA7 to be picky with memory.

 

[nemouk]

I agree with Insane3D's statement.

I have a KA7 and am running 4 generic pc100 sticks with no problems, at CAS 2 and Turbo.

 

[RentaCow]

I haven't had any problems running my ram with my ASUS K7V.

I had two sticks of generic PC100 SDRAM, and I couldn't get them both to run reliably together in my old FIC PA2013 mobo. Actually I could... It was working fine up until one day I was poking around inside the case to set overclock jumpers and then felt a nice little shock (turns out the wiring in my house was done backwards and my carpet was wet... so, I got some ~110Volts of AC power flowing through me, through the computer components, and to the computer's case which is grounded at the power supply, which is hooked to ground on the AC powerline.) Turned on the computer and everything appeared okay accept that it was suddenly highly unstable (not due to overclocking either). Anyways, from then on I had to remove one of the two 64MB generic PC100 modules I had in order to make it stable again.

Interestingly after some experimenting I found that the RAM module DID work okay when it was plugged into my brother's Abit BP6 mobo (which of course uses the highly reliable/stable 440BX chipset). So I left it that way until I upgraded to my Thunderbird 700 and ASUS K7V mobo just recently. Anyways I took my ram back and they are both working flawlessly at 100MHz CAS2.

So from my experience, I'd say any Athlon-Memory problems are probably motherboard specific problems. Considering that I haven't heard of any problems with RAM on the KX133 chipset, I'd guess that you should be perfectly safe in upgrading.