RAM: Now actually cheap as chips

[sonofsanta]

Depends on where you buy your chips, I suppose, but still: RAM is ludicrously inexpensive right now.

 

eBuyer are listing 8GB of Corsair XMS3 DDR3 RAM (2x4Gb) at <£35.

 

Thirty-five pounds for 8096Mb of RAM. I remember buying a single megabyte for around £100 for an Amiga back in the day! (or, rather, my Dad buying it. But still.)

 

Anyway, just a heads up that it is insanely cheap, now is an excellent time to buy some before there's a volcano in the middle of the one factory district where it's all produced, because I know I was bloody surprised at how inexpensive it suddenly is so I thought I'd pass the joy on.

 

(and with my car passing its MOT this morning without any work needing doing, well... that's like getting £250 free now I've not had to spend that on tyres/brakes/whatever, so might just have to get some myself )

[tech_guy]

It's great isn't it - I stuffed 16GB in to my main rig at home last year and it only cost around £80. Six months previously it had been nearly double that.

[newpersn]

my I3 had 3GB ram when i built it. Now upped it to 8GB DDR3 its now quick. 1.5TB of Hard drive space. insted of 640GB (Added 1TB Drive)

[X-13]

Ooh, I need more RAM.

 

But, I think I'm capped at 4GB. [2x2GB]

 

It doesn't help that I'm seeing conflicting specs of what I can actually use.

 

Some places say DDR2, some say DDR3. [and I don't have my computer to hand to check.]

[SHimmer45]

the board i have in my cheap home pc can use either DDR2/DDR3 which i spouse is a handy feature to a point but you cant populate them both and DDR3 actually limits the HT speed.

[X-13]

the board i have in my cheap home pc can use either DDR2/DDR3 which i spouse is a handy feature to a point but you cant populate them both and DDR3 actually limits the HT speed.

 

This is a laptop. I think the official spec is DDR2 SODIMM [up to 4GB]

 

I swear DDR3 has a different connection, meaning you can't whack DDR3 into a DDR2 slot.

[SHimmer45]

The connection is VERY similar as the notch is in a slightly different position, the voltage is lower than DDR2 also

[sonofsanta]

Run CPU-Z when you're next on the machine and it'll tell you what you have, and your model of mobo to check against a memory selector.

[X-13]

The connection is VERY similar as the notch is in a slightly different position, the voltage is lower than DDR2 also

 

DDR3 isn't backwards compatable though.

 

DDR3 SDRAM is neither forward nor backward compatible with any earlier type of random access memory (RAM) due to different signaling voltages, timings, and other factors.

 

 

Also, the notch is about 1.5cm away from where the DDR2/DDR one is.

 

It's enough of a gap to make me hesitate spending out on RAM I can't use.