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Newb question: Will DDR400 run at DDR333 speed?

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ColdMiser

Member
Joined
Feb 22, 2001
Location
Georgia
I am buying RAM for a motherboard whose documentation says it supports "DDR333/DDR266" DIMMs. For the sake of longevity, I'd like to buy DDR400. DDR400 is even usually less expensive.

So will DDR400 run slower to maintain compatibility? The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-8IP900. I'm planning on buying a pair of 512's.
 
ColdMiser said:
I am buying RAM for a motherboard whose documentation says it supports "DDR333/DDR266" DIMMs. For the sake of longevity, I'd like to buy DDR400. DDR400 is even usually less expensive.

So will DDR400 run slower to maintain compatibility? The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-8IP900. I'm planning on buying a pair of 512's.

It's been my experience that it will work. I've put DDR400 in a few older systems.
 
95% of the time they work, you may also be able to find a bios update (flash) to allow it to support 400mhz ram. I've dealt with a couple boards that I was able to flash like that. Something to look into anyways.
 
Yes, it will. If it doesn't, it's a problem with the stick of ram, or the company who made it doesn't understand how to produce ram at all, and you don't need to buy from them.
 
I got the Corsair ValueSelect pack of two 512's of DDR400. I flashed the mobo to the latest firmware, but that did not permit the memory to run at full speed. It politely stepped down to run at DDR333 speed and is working perfectly.
 
I believe that you can almost always downclock DDR400 down to DDR333 speeds without issues, however, what I've seen is that many boards will limit the amount of higher rated speed ram that it can support, for example, it might be able to support 3 DIMMs of DDR266 or DDR333, but only support a single DIMM of DDR400 (this is what the official support is for the Abit BH7 845PE chipset based mobo). While it might support more, the official support is limited to one DIMM when using DDR400 sticks. Your mobo may have similar limitations. This limitation would then affect the amount of total ram that you could run (say 2 x 512 vs a single 512 stick of DDR400).

Check your mobo's manual or mfg web site to see if there are any such limitations placed on yours.
 
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