RAM help

[aluminumspleen]

This is more of a "computers in general" question. How do I figure out what type of RAM I need? I just inherited an old Gateway with a Celeron 366MHz processor and 64M of RAM. I looked inside, and there's another slot, and I'd like to get some more RAM, but the BIOS just says "SDRAM". Is this DDR? PC100? How do I find out?

[rokytnji]

From what I have gathered on your new toy thread. And owning some ancient Gear. More than Likely your ram is PC100 or PC133 SDRAM. They make different pin counts to. You won't probably have any DDR ram on that old Gateway. What's funny id I have a old 64 mb stick of sdram that I received with another item from EBAY because of certain Ebay seller rules. I don't know if it's any good, I don't have a box to test it with. You are welcome to it . PM me if you wan't it.

Without a O/S running in your box, the best and easiest way I know of to find out exactly what ram is compatible with your box is to let Crucial.com to a scan of your computers hardware, and they will email you the ram specs. Maybe booting up a Damn Small Linux Distro and using Terminal will get you the specs. Or just physically pull the ram and look at the label. Make sure you count the pins to.

[L4Linux]

SDRAM is the old type of RAM, before DDR was released.

[oz]

How do I figure out what type of RAM I need?

...also don't forget that the computer manual or motherboard manual are usually one of the best sources to see what hardware is truly compatible with your setup.

If you don't have it on hand, you can usually find the manual you need with some online searching, and then download it to keep on hand for later use.

[bigtomrodney]

I ran a fair few P-IIs in a corporate environment that used 66MHz SD-RAM. Generally there is a tolerance for one step up or down but that is not always the case. It is however a bad idea to mix speeds. They will definitely run at the lower speed but it can cause other strange problems. If it is a 366MHz I'm thinking it would be 66MHz.

[HROAdmin26]

The Celery's of that age were in fact 66MHz FSB (front side bus) - and that was when the FSB had to match the RAM speed. So you are looking at 66MHz SDRAM - such as these.

They only list PC100 and PC133. PC100 = 100MHz, which may work for you.

You definitely need to check the mobo specs to make certain it's 3.3V 168-Pin and *how big* of a stick it will support. If it's a 3 slot mobo, it'll probably only support 128MB sticks for a 384MB total.

[bigtomrodney]

On a side note I once had a P-II that had three slots and had a BIOS capacity for 756MB of RAM. In a P-II!! It was only a desktop. I've never forgotten this because it was in fact one of the aforementioned 66MHz BUS models and I just can't conceive of having 256MB 66MHz SDR. That would be crazy! Haha.

The funny thing is even as I type this I know one of you guys will tell me you had a P-II with 756MB of RAM...

[aluminumspleen]

Hey all, thanks for the quick and informative responses! This has definatly given me a great insight into hardware. It's nice to know that the '100' in PC100 is the FSB speed. I can't recall the exact value, but I know it's in the BIOS.

Roky, thanks so much for the offer, but I think I can scrounge some up.