Using DDR400 on a DDR266 M.Board

[mohanty1942]

My friend has a Mercury PVCLE266M-L mobo based system.
[CPU VIA C3 Samual 2 processor onboard
FSB 133MHz
Chipset CLE266/8235]

The mobo's specification/manual tells it supports DDR266 i.e: "Memory
- 2 x 184-pin DIMM sockets support two2.5V DDR SDRAMs (DDR266)
- Maximum: 2GB "

One fine morning his single stick memory (DDR266, 256 MB) failed. After that he installed a DDR400 stick which worked well.

My questions are :

(1)" Is it advisable to use DDR400 or DDR333 on this board when the specification says it supports only DDR266 ?"
(2) " Is there any adverse/+ve effect if we use DDR400/DDR333 on this board? "

[anubhav_har]

see running a higher ram than the expected one will not work. Since the mobo manual states 266mhz then run 266, dont run 333 or 400. it will work but your machine will hang, programs will give problems, mobo gets heated.. etc. etc.. Therefore use a 266mhz memory module

[deathvirus_me]

the ddr400 should work fine .. but it'll work as a ddr266 ram module .... though u might get additional benefits of a ddr400 module (if the mobo supports them) ....

[krish]

Hello People,

This same thing happened with me. I have A7V266-MX board (Asus Via km266 chipset). The manual says that it can support a max. of 266 Mhz of RAM. But I'm successfully using 400 Mhz RAM. There is no hanging of programs etc. as anubhav_har said. It is working perfectly fine.

I checked it with cpu-z & sisoft sandra 2005. The RAM IS working on 400 MHz.

Another thing is that my mobo manual said that my board supports a max. of 4X AGP. The options in the BIOS were on 2X/4X. But as soon as I installed my Geforce FX 5200 128MB card (8X), the options changed to 4X/8X. And I'm able to run it on 8X. All the diagnostic softwares also said so.

Can anyone clarify??????????

[cyrux]

AGP cards are backward compatible so 8x card would definately work on a 4x slot ...so no probs with that

[krish]

cyrux, Backward compatibility is fine. That means that my 8X card should work at 4X. But this not the case. It IS ACTUALLY working at 8X.

I think you didn't read the reply entirely. I said that the options in the bios are also changed. And I've checked it with almost all the diagnostic softwares that my card in running at 8X.

[krish]

And what abt the memory??? Any idea??

[pimpom]

@ krish : I haven't used the A7V266-MX board, so I can only make a guess. Perhaps the manufacturers upgraded the BIOS, making it compliant with AGP 8X and DDR400, but neglected to update the manual. This has been known to happen before with other products.

A visit to their website may help clarify things. No time to do that myself right now.

[krish]

pimpom I that is the reason. Thanks