Which RAM

:)hello,can anyone give me some advice. Im currently running 2 x 1gb 5300 sticks of ram, im looking to go up to 4 ram as i play a lot of online gaming. 2 questions.... 1: can anyone recommend some good types of ram,will pay around £60.....2:being as my current ram is 5300 have i got to stick to this or can i run faster sticks like 6400 for instance, i dont know much about my motherboard only that its a hewlett packard factory fitted one. apologise for the lack of knowledge, any feedback appreciated.

Well you would be best suited to run all the same ram speed and ideally timings as well, without knowing what speeds your motherboard supports it is hard to suggest what to get. obviously it supports 5300 and you could easily get another 2 GB for less than £30 assuming you have 2 spare slots :)

The other thing worth noting is do you have a 64bit OS? If not then if you install 4GB of memory you will only be able to access 3 and a bit GB.

If your motherboard will support it you can move up to DDR2 6400 (800mhz) and get a 4GB kit (2x2GB) for £70 by Corsair from Scan or faster timings OCZ Reaper for £75 from OCUK, or Aria were doing 4GB for cheap of their own branded memory.

I'm not a RAM expert but I'd say there isn't enough info there for a proper answer. What speed of memory your mobo will support depends on the mobo, and OEM mobos aren't known for being the highest spec or most versatile around ...... usually.

If the mobo supports faster memory, then there's a decent chance that sticking 6400 in will work, but probably only at the existing speed. And even if you replace all the memory with 6400, it's hard to be sure what benefit you'll get, unless you overclock and that depends on what the mobo will let you do ..... which is back to my first point.

How amenable boards are to games with memory (like mix-and-match speeds) varies. With some, it'll work. But, from personal experience, it wasn't that long ago that selecting memory was an absolute nightmare, even for major system integrators. The technical director of a well-known name OEM is a friend of mine, and it got to the point where they were selecting memory suppliers according to those that could supply batches of memory that were consistent, because all too often, they'd buy memory that worked this month, and next month the same memory wouldn't work in the same PC, because the memory timings, batch to batch, weren't consistent enough. It's better, as I understand it, these days (much better), but you're still, in my view, asking a rather unanswerable question, at least with the info you've given.

But I'm not an expert so by all means wait for a reply from someone that is. Who knows .... I might well learn something too. ;)

how can i find what speeds my motherboard supports? motherboard is intel g33 express, data bus speed 1066mhz.

try using the memory configuaraton on this page

Welcome to Corsair

or the Crucial Memory Advisor™ tool

Memory upgrades, flash media, and usb storage at Crucial.com

or memorey search

Kingston Technology Company - Technology Homepage - Where To Go To Find Memory

or OCZ Ultimate Memory Configurator

OCZ Ultimate Memory Configurator

cheers great help

Good types = Manufactuers? Then..... Corsair. I now only every buy Corsair.