I have a dell dimension 9200 with 2gb of ram and want to upgrade for better gaming to 4gb. what things do I need to look for? any suggestions on what to get? It takes ddr2 ram I believe. Whats the difference between the $100 ram vs the $250 ram when they are both 2 gbs?

 

http://www.crucial.com , this is the only place I have ever bought memory from. I had never had a problem. Getting ready to buy another 4gb from them this week for my desktop.


You can d/l their "advisor" and it will tell you just what you need.

 

You want your memory to run at a certain speed, to match your processor speed.
Getting slower memory will slow you down, but once you have the right speed, faster memory won't help you either. (Unless you later overclock/upgrade your cpu).

- Frank

 

unless you plan on replacing your existing memory i usually try to match specs on the existing memory so they work together without problems. If your old memory is slower than the new memory it will actually slow down the new memory.

 

most ddr2 ram nowaday are cheap! You can get a 4GB DDR2 800 for about $80. The faster speed are for overclocking (making your processor faster!)

 

Im super impatient so im going to Microcenter to see if they have anything comparable. I did check crucial and they have what i need so if no luck at the store i'll order it online. Whats this about adding new ram making my computer slower?

 

It will not make your computer slower, but if you purchase faster RAM than what you have now, this faster RAM will slow down to match your current RAM's speed. You will not notice the difference.

Make sure that you have slots opened for RAM, at Dell they might of sandwiched in 4x512MB...
And if you really want to enjoy games, 2GB of RAM is ok, rather use the money to purchase a high end video-card with at least 512MB of RAM and a fast GPU, this will take away the pressure from your processor, and thus increasing your frames dramatically.

 

I guess you have the ATI x1300 video card with the 9200 and running Vista.

The computer can see only up to 3 gig of RAM. So, don't freak out when you put 4 there but it shows only 3.

Just take out the old one and see if it is PC5300 or something like that and go buy the same PC5300 RAM.

 

I got the new ram a few days ago and installed it and it does show that I have 4 gigs installed, however, when i run the windows experience index for vista my Ram Operations per seconds score went down from a 5.6 to a 5.5. My games to load a little bit faster and run a little better but not much. The ram was 60 bucks with a 30 dollar mail in rebate so it was only $30 but eh I was expecting blinding fast speeds which just wasnt the case. I have a Nvidia 8600GTS graphics card. My lowest score on the index was for my processor which has 2 intel core 2 6420 @ 2.13ghz

 

well I just went on new egg and purchased another evga 8600gts card so I can run dual cards on the machine. Hopefully this will let me run Crysis on the highest settings. If I run into problems, hopefully you guys will be able to help me out. oh it was only $60. $100 - $40 mail in rebate.

 

It says the card was delivered today! Im stuck at work till 11:30 and I cant wait to go home and install it. I hope its just plug and play.

 

Got the card, opened the computer, found out I dont have an extra slot for it. STUPID! :ANGRY: Looks like im going to have to return it and get the 8800gt which might be better but i have a feeling this return process is going to be difficult.

 

You'd do best to get 3gb of ram as by default your pc will not recognise all 4 gbs. It will take some bios tweaking to get the rest of it.

What ever you do, do not get more than 4gb as it is impossible for windows xp,vista (32 bit) to use more than that.

As far as differences in ram from different manufacturers it has to do with latency. The lower the latency the faster it is, but unless you're gaming a lot you probably won't notice the difference. Also be aware that more money doesn't necessarily guarantee better results.

 

Yeah the computer is recognizing all 4 gigs of ram, it just doesnt seem like its utilizing it all. Oh well.