Which DDR PC2700 for Dell 4550?

[kyudrew]

I am planning to upgrade the memory of my dell 4550 (in production). I ordered 128mb on board
(I believe it may be Samsung).
Which brand/model would be good?

I found some good deal on Crucial and Kingston Value Ram, though.
Also, I heard someone bought a ram from Crucial/Kingston and got Samsung one, not Micron.
Would it be really possible? If yes, it would be meaningless to order memory at a selected manufacturer's
site.

I am thinking to buy 512MB stick for the second slot. Would it (128+512) be okay?
Or, do I have to match the size of memory in two slots as well as the brands
& type (PC 2700, non-ecc, ...) for optimal performance?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Crucial is using someone else's chips on some modules, but I don't know exactly which ones. It's still not bad to order from a specific manufacturer, because you get the quality of the whole module even if it uses the same chips as a generic module. However recently people have had problems with Crucial PC2700 I guess, so you may not want to go that route.

Because the system isn't dual channel, it doesn't matter what size module you use. They do both have to be either ECC or non-ECC though, and will run at the speed of the slowest module so putting PC3200 in won't help, but PC2100 would slow it down.

Try to see exactly what type of memory is installed. If you can get specs on it, you can see what sort of memory you ought to buy. It's likely that it's 2.5-3-3-6 rated memory, but it could be even slower, so there wouldn't be any point in getting low-latency modules for the extra memory.

 

[Pothead]

Crucial uses Micron chips.

The only actual problem with the pc2700 by Crucial is that it is incompatible with some Nforce2 boards and OCing it is very poor. Crucial has said they have resolved the problem, read about it at amdmb

 

[Lord Evermore]

Actually I have seen mention of Crucial using other chips for certain modules. It may have been the PC3200.