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Dear Tech Report Community,

I am considering to purchase extra RAM for my Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3 motherboard.
Currently I have two 1024 MB PC2-6400 DDR2-SDRAM Muskin 991533 (996533) already installed. One is in slot 0 and the other is in slot 2. I am pretty sure it's dual-channel.

I hope to purchase more RAM at a price that is hopefully less than $100. I would like to have extra 4GB of RAM (or more if it's not too pricy) but I don't know how RAM compatibility works very well.
I heard it's best to get similar type of RAM but then I will only have 4GB of RAM rather than 6GB (also I am not sure I can find any more of these RAM modules).

So for example, would Crucial Ballistix BLS2G2D80EBS1S00 work well with my system? Are there better options out there? Can I get something that's greater than PC2-6400? If at all possible I would like to keep using my Muskin.

Any help is much appreciated,

Moejoe

Hey there, and welcome.

The RAM you linked should work fine with your system, and with your 2GB of RAM should give you a total of 6GB of memory. It'll run at the speed of the slower RAM - it's all PC2-6400, but if some of the timings are slower on one pair than the other, it'll use the slowest timings. That's honestly not a big deal from a performance standpoint.

Just make sure you're using a 64-bit OS or else you won't "see" more than 3-3.5GB. Check out the first post of Dude, where's my 4GB? for more details on why that is.

And if you are using a 64-bit version of Windows, make sure that you have memory remapping enabled or else you still might not see all of your memory.

thank you, that helps!

PS. which one of these would you recommend? They appear to be almost the same but one is cheaper and the other one has nicer looking heatsinks (Corsair) and has exactly the same timings as my Muskin.
CORSAIR XMS2 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as ... 6820145176
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as ... 6820231122