I have an emachines E4024 desktop PC with a Pentium 4 2.93 GHz processor, and I have two strips of memory, each one 256 MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM, totalling 512 MB of memory. I'd like to buy some more, so I've checked inside for free slots and there is one free slot next to each of the full slots. One small thing I've noticed is that the slots containing the existing strips have grey clips at each end, and the empty slots have black clips at each end. I'm sure this is nothing but I thought I should mention it in case it might be significant. Anyway, my main question is, do I need to buy PC3200 DDR SDRAM, or do I just need to buy DDR SDRAM, or even just SDRAM? One type of memory I found online was Kingston 512MB PC3200 400MHz DDR-SDRAM Memory 184 Pin DIMM, which seems to get good reviews. Would this be worth going for? And is there anything else I should be taking into consideration? Thanks in advance.

Hey Ian,

You are going to want to buy the same speed memory as your other sticks. So if your original two sticks are PC3200, then that's what you need to go with. If you added say PC2700, then all your sticks will then operate at that slower speed.

The reason you have two black clips and two grey clips is because your motherboard supports dual channel memory. In basic terms, it works more efficiently than single channel by accessing two sticks of memory at once rather than one single stick of memory at a time. Here is a more descriptive article - Dual-channel architecture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Since you have dual channel memory, your best bet will be to get two matching sticks of memory to put in the last two open slots. Dual channel only works when you have matching sticks. Your memory will still work without filling both slots, but it will work better if you use both. If you wanted to add a gig of memory, it would be better for you to add 2 - 512 sticks of memory rather than one gig stick.

Hope that helps!

Well, you have two choices, as said above, you can get 2 more sticks of PC3200, or you can swap out your two current ones to be able to run them in dual channel (get like 2x 1Gb sticks) which will make the memory perform much faster then if you fill all the memory slots.

2x 1Gb Sticks:
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2x 512Mbs Sticks:
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2x 256Mbs Sticks:
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If you're looking for performance, swap your current sticks out for 2x 1Gb sticks, it's well worth it

Thanks guys, that's excellent advice! Looks like I'll either be getting memory of the same speed or all new memory then. Thanks again!

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