DDR2 Help

[91wow]

Hello all! Long time no see! Currently I'm working on slightly upgrading my "new" pc (x5450, 7870, 6GB ram) by adding more ram to the system. Now the problem is that I'm not really all that knowledgeable on DDR2 Ram and buying it used on Ebay is confusing me a little bit. I can't just buy a single stick as I currently have 4 sticks in my system equaling 6GBs and its throwing off errors and it's just not enough (I also think it's holding back my overclocking a bit). 

 

So now, my question is when it comes to looking for good DDR2 ram, what brand should I look for? Samsung or hynix? I know my motherboard supports DDR2 1066 but I think DDR2 800 is fine and also, a lot of the listing say stuff like "AMD system only" or "AMD ram" would this matter? I know a lot of what you'll see on ebay is old server stuff and I'm fine with that. 

 

Any help would be appreciated greatly and I'm looking forward to being back on the forum after my long hiatus! 

 

 

System specs that matter:

Intel xeon x5450 3.5GHZ

Radeon 7870 (horrible overclocker btw) 

4GB Samsung 800 ram

2GB gskil rip jaws 800 ram

Intel 535 ssd

Oct triton 480 ssd

[kelvinhall05]

When someone says "AMD only RAM" they don't know much (if anything) about computers. It's fine to get that, and brand doesn't really matter, as long as it works.

[91wow]

2 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

When someone says "AMD only RAM" they don't know much (if anything) about computers. It's fine to get that, and brand doesn't really matter, as long as it works.

Well with the 775 stuff you can't just overstock the CPU, the ram gets hit too and I know some chip brands overstock a lot better than others. I'm just wondering if the tale of Samsung is better for this chipset and a lot of people on here are really knowledgeable on the 775 platform

[tatte]

Motherboard matters quite a lot more than SSDs when talking about memory.

 

You should be able to manually reduce the RAM speed and keep pushing your CPU. If you'd go with 1066 MHz memory, you'd have some headroom in case the sweet spot for your CPU doesn't hit the incrementally adjustable 800 MHz mark for your RAM (in comparison to your current situation).

 

21 minutes ago, 91wow said:

I know a lot of what you'll see on ebay is old server stuff and I'm fine with that. 

I don't know what you mean by being fine with that, some servers use normal ECC memory, while others use fully buffered ECC memory. Both are sold as "server memory", but FB-DIMMs are physically different from the plain/ECC versions.

 

Seems like the "AMD Only" DDR2 provides slight benefits on AMD based systems, but everything points to such memory performing just as well as regular memory on Intel based systems.

[91wow]

13 minutes ago, tatte said:

Motherboard matters quite a lot more than SSDs when talking about memory.

 

You should be able to manually reduce the RAM speed and keep pushing your CPU. If you'd go with 1066 MHz memory, you'd have some headroom in case the sweet spot for your CPU doesn't hit the incrementally adjustable 800 MHz mark for your RAM (in comparison to your current situation).

 

I don't know what you mean by being fine with that, some servers use normal ECC memory, while others use fully buffered ECC memory. Both are sold as "server memory", but FB-DIMMs are physically different from the plain/ECC versions.

 

Seems like the "AMD Only" DDR2 provides slight benefits on AMD based systems, but everything points to such memory performing just as well as regular memory on Intel based systems.

So would you say spending the extra bit for 1066 over 800 ram is worth it? I know my cpu should be able to reach a lot higher than it is right now. Most of what I'm seeing from my stepping is 3.9 to 4.1GHz while mine is BSOD on 3.6 sometimes. I do have mismatch ram as well and I think that might be why games like minecraft is spitting out errors when a lot of mods are loaded and it starts taxing the ram more. 

[JoostinOnline]

The last time I saw anything about DDR2 RAM was in chapter 18 of my high school history text book

[tatte]

3 hours ago, 91wow said:

So would you say spending the extra bit for 1066 over 800 ram is worth it? I know my cpu should be able to reach a lot higher than it is right now. Most of what I'm seeing from my stepping is 3.9 to 4.1GHz while mine is BSOD on 3.6 sometimes. I do have mismatch ram as well and I think that might be why games like minecraft is spitting out errors when a lot of mods are loaded and it starts taxing the ram more. 

Depends on the cost, but faster is of course always better. At what speed is your RAM running when you're at 3.6? All my experiences with RAM is that they're always terrible to overclock, no matter how little. So I wouldn't try to push them past what they are rated for. If that doesn't fix the stability, you're pushing the CPU too much.

 

Mismatching RAM shouldn't be a problem (it can be, but it's something I have never experienced so ehh). You can just as well test the stability of the system with stock clocks. I'm no expert, but even the hacks done to S775 to accommodate a Xeon could complicate things. Furthermore I could doubt the overclockability of Xeons as a whole (I really should look into this since I'm running a dual Xeon setup myself, but...)

 

Stability tests, so much stability tests is needed.

 

2 hours ago, JoostinOnline said:

The last time I saw anything about DDR2 RAM was in chapter 18 of my high school history text book

Kids...

[91wow]

1 hour ago, tatte said:

Depends on the cost, but faster is of course always better. At what speed is your RAM running when you're at 3.6? All my experiences with RAM is that they're always terrible to overclock, no matter how little. So I wouldn't try to push them past what they are rated for. If that doesn't fix the stability, you're pushing the CPU too much.

 

Mismatching RAM shouldn't be a problem (it can be, but it's something I have never experienced so ehh). You can just as well test the stability of the system with stock clocks. I'm no expert, but even the hacks done to S775 to accommodate a Xeon could complicate things. Furthermore I could doubt the overclockability of Xeons as a whole (I really should look into this since I'm running a dual Xeon setup myself, but...)

 

Stability tests, so much stability tests is needed.

 

Kids...

The ram right now is at 837mhz just because of the FSB speed. Trying to keep the ram at as close to the default as possible. 

[JoostinOnline]

10 hours ago, tatte said:

Kids...

I was just joking lol. I sold it, but I was still using a laptop with DDR2 RAM until about a year ago.