Ddr And Sdram

[Guest Trios]

Someone donated an Athlon XP w/ motherboard (I'm not entirely sure of the brand, I don't have it with me yet) to my school and they are in turn donating it to ME! I'm pretty sure the MB would use DDR RAM, but they didn't donate any of that, just 10 sticks of 512 MB PC133 SDRAM that comes in cases that says its 256 meg DDR....I guess they upgraded their RAM or whatever and put the old stuff into the new box. Anyhow, to my question...

 

If this motherboard DOES use DDR RAM, can I use PC133 SDRAM in it at just not use the DDR function? I saw a DDR review on this site where they took out a PC133 chip and put in some PC2100 and it worked, so I'm guessing this would work...?

 

If not I'll have some money rolling in soon, probably enough for another 512 stick of DDR for that comp, but since I won't be using it for gaming or memory intensive operations I hope I can put that stick in my gaming machine B)

 

Trios

Edited October 9, 2003 by Trios

[Hades25]

If this motherboard DOES use DDR RAM, can I use PC133 SDRAM in it at just not use the DDR function? I saw a DDR review on this site where they took out a PC133 chip and put in some PC2100 and it worked, so I'm guessing this would work...?

cool if this does work....but i thought ddr and sdram had different #'s of pins and the slot a was a little different

[ClayMeow]

i'm pretty sure you cannot do that. ddr and sdram use different slots and thus, they're not backwards compatible. That's why, back-in-the-day when ddr first came out, they created boards that had both DDR slots AND sdram slots.

[Some_Guy_]

SDR is 168 pin, 3.3 volt. DDR is 184 (I think) pin and lower voltage. You might be able to fit an SDR module in a DDR slot (but it won't work), but not the other way around, as SDR slots have 2 notches.