Can RAM of different latencies/voltage be installed on the same mobo?

[Tac]

Since i upgraded my machine (mobo/ram/cpu/vid card) this month, im building a 2nd one out of spare parts from 2 older computers I had hanging around... donating it to a 13yr old kid whose parents cant afford to buy a pc and she needs it for school.

a classmate gave me those sticks of ram and they matched the DDR and PC# of the ram i had installed..the voltage and latency are different though.

Since this is for a classwork computer with some minor gaming (the sims pretty much) I really dont care if the system ends up adopting the slower speed ram settings. As long as it works for her.

old system is being built as:

AMD dual core 4400
500W PSU
160gb HDD
Asus A8NE mobo
SB LIVE! (its better than the mobo audio)
Nvidia BFG 7800GT 256mb
...and an oldie 21" gaming CRT monitor.


The ram i have installed is OCZ :

http://www.ocztechnology.com/product...annel_platinum


the free sticks I got are Crucial:

http://www.crucial.com/store/partspe...le=ct12864z40b


granted, the system does work a-ok with the 2gb only but it'd be nice to pump it to 4gb and maybe she can do some video editing and even play oblivion (she enjoys the dress-up mods available and the magic) with decent performance.


so.. any way to make these 2 rams work? (i was thinking one pair in 1 channel, 2nd pair in channel 2 and maybe some sort of bios setting to set the speed on them... dunno.. im out of my element on this one).

[BaldEagl]

It will work and will default to the slowest RAM speeds.

[Chalenge]

It might work and it might not. The problem is that the BIOSs ability to auto-set the speed is not always efficient. After you set it up if you find it is not stable then you know what the problem is.

Just make sure you turn the system off and unplug the PSU altogether before you try to install the new memory.

[Knite]

It's possible, but not advised.

Many motherboards cannot handle different voltages across chips well, and not all can handle different speeds across memory channels either. Different speeds tend to default to the lower of the two if it'll work at all.

If you want to be sure it'll work, stick with same size, voltage, speed. Otherwise it's a complete "crapshoot".

[gyrene81]

Those links are getting 404 error, page not found. Any way of finding better links?

There are several ways/reasons it wouldn't work but as long as your not putting ecc memory on a non-ecc mobo or vice versa, you should not have much problem. You might notice some quirky behavior once in a while with some Intel chipsets and WinXP.

Try to post some better links, or the part numbers so we can see the exact specs.