Advice on a memory upgrade

[Spud1]

I can finally afford to upgrade the memory in my pc, jumping from 1gig to 2gig(+)..i'm starting to notice the slowdown in games like BF2142 and wow (with lots of addons loaded), and i'm sure Vista would *love* an upgrade.

My problem is that i currently have 4x256 sticks of DDR2 PC2-4300 ram (2xCrucial and 2xSamsung sticks), and that means all my memory slots are full ;/

So my question is whats the best way to upgrade this system? Buy 2x1gig sticks and put them in alone? Or with 2 of the old sticks in the empty slots? Or would a single chip be better..

I'm leaning towards buying 2x1gig sticks and putting them in with 2 of the old sticks, but i'm not sure if thi is the best way to do it (no idea if it affects dual channel mode etc or not..really not up to speed with hardware these days).

So any advice? My mainboard has an Intel 925EX-ICH6 chipset, its an ECS PF21-extreme.

Thanks in advance,

Spud/Pete

[ajbrun]

I'm leaning towards buying 2x1gig sticks and putting them in with 2 of the old sticks, but i'm not sure if thi is the best way to do it (no idea if it affects dual channel mode etc or not..really not up to speed with hardware these days).

I'm no expert either, but from what I've heard, I'm pretty sure you'd be better of just having 2x1Gb sticks, and leaving out your old stuff as it'll just slow the new memory down.

[EtheAv8r]

Buy 2 * 1 GB you can always test with and additional 2 * 512 in as well, but 2 * 1GB alone will suffice.