How Critical is it to have Name Brand Ram?

[BATTLEFROG]

I'm getting some lock up problems and have been told it might be my RAM. How critical is it to have name brand? What are some good name brands to buy?

Thanks All

[jmr89gt]

I had 256 megs of Generic pc133 Ram with Micron chips and I kept getting weird registry errors, and programs shutting off on me at anything over 137fsb cas3. I just bought 256 meg Crucial cas 2 pc 133 and am running it at 147fsb CAS 2 and all the errors went away. I would say get Crucial, Mushkin or the Kingmax pc150.

[Matt]

Corsair is very good ram also.

:)

[Matt]

Corsair is very good ram also.

:)

[proze]

if you're ever going to want to get high fsbs with ram at cas2, then you're going to need good ram. there are exceptions, where people get lucky with generic ram, but for the most part brand-name is the way to go. Try mushkin (http://www.mushkin.com), crucial (http://www.crucial.com), memman (http://www.memman.com) and corsair. the crucial is amazingly cheap at the moment..

[SickBoy]

for a system to simply run? not entirely. to run at high performance? yes, it is. I have a stick of CAS3 PC100 and a stick of CAS2 PC100 (both generic) that run at (what I've tested so far) 136 MHz FSB without so much as a hiccup (set to CAS3) but there is a performance difference between CAS2 and CAS3. In my opinion, ram is real cheap right now so you shouldn't have too much of a problem dropping a little coin on some quality Micron or Infineon stuff. Like Proze says, quality is good.

Sickboy