RAM Upgrade

D

Dragon Wizard

Geek Trainee
I have a Dell Dimension 4700 with 512 MB of Ram.

I want to get two sticks of 1 GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400).

However, I cannot determine if it will be compattible. Some sites say the computer can use PC2 6400, whilst others say it can only hold PC2-5300 and PC2-4200.

Can the computer hold the PC2 6400?

If it can, the Ram I want to get also supports Dual Channel mode, however it says the mobo ram voltage needs to be set to 1.9v. I have no idea how to do this, or even if there would be a benefit to running dual channel mode?

Please help.
 
I can tell you that if the PC is older than 3 years it does not use PC2 ram, more likely to be regular ddr ram with the highest speed of about 400MHz Dual-Channel (PC3200). Not that this really matters but, most likely, you cannot set voltages to ram since dell locks up your bios settings so stupid people cannot fuck up their computer. Luckily for you you don't even have to do that. The bios either adjusts the voltage automatically or the voltage difference is not sufficient enough to cause memory errors. Dual-Channel mode is literally twice faster so yes, you do, very much, want to run dual-channel. All you have to do is figure out which ram slots are channel one and channel two, if you have 4, 2 of them will be channel one and 2 will be channel two, if you put two or four in the slots, they will run in dual, if you have two slots, put two sticks in there and they will run dual.

For future reference, most computer manufacturers put detailed specifications about their products online. The specs should be model specific so type in your info. They also will often tell you what you can upgrade and what's compatible.
 
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