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I used this question to calculate if RAM from an old system will work in a new system; it seems to me that it won't work.

The old system has a CPU with an FSB of 533 with DDR2 RAM, resulting in an Effective Speed of 2.1 GHz.

The new system has a CPU with an FSB of 800 with DDR2 RAM, resulting in an Effective Speed of 3.2 GHz.

The effective speed of the RAM for the new system is faster than the Effective Speed of the RAM for the old system, and thus the RAM from the old system will not work in the new system correct?

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leeand00
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2 Answers2

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your ram is pc2-5300 ~666mhz and your cpu is designed to work with pc2-6400 ~800mhz or above so I don't think your ram will work with your pentium 4 cpu.

You can still try lowering the fsb through your bios. I wouldn't touch it.

If you wanna make sure you reported the correct speed of your ram, you can install hwinfo64 and check the frequencies supported by your ram. It's a window like this.

enter image description here

Uğur Gümüşhan
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Both the question and the accepted answer contain egregiously wrong information.

As deduced from the comments, you have a Dell OptiPlex 740 with AMD Athlon 64 1640B. However the component list in the product support webpage erroneously includes Intel Pentium M Dothan 740, which is simply ridiculous, as you cannot have both AMD and Intel CPU in one PC.

Since this Intel CPU has 533 FSB, you mistake this as the FSB of your AMD CPU. In fact, the talk of FSB for AMD is inappropriate as AMD has a dedicated Memory Bus which allows your RAM to run at speed independent of the FSB.

So does this mean AMD is superior as RAM speed is reliant on FSB for Intel? Not exactly!

Because the method you quoted and used to determine RAM speed is also wrong. There is something called Memory Divider which allows the RAM to negogiate with Motherboard in order to run at full speed, and it usually works.

To put it simply, your DDR2-667 RAM will run at full speed, as it is the general standard for DDR2-compatible motherboard.

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