Most of you will laugh at my stupidity but I've been unable to google up the answer... I have two Dell Optiplex 780 SFF pc's; the chipsets are Q45 and they have two different processors, one has: Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5400 2.7 GHz, FSB 800 MHz, L2 2 MB and the other pc has: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 2.66 GHz, FSB 1333 MHz, L2 4 MB Currently I'm using two 1-gb sticks of PC3-10600 in both. I got a couple 2-gb sticks of Micron PC3-12800U off Ebay (exact part: MT4JTF25664AZ-1G6E1) and neither pc would even boot. I updated to the latest BIOS and then looked around in there trying to find a memory speed setting but didn't see any. I'd like to stick with 32-bit Windows 7 so that I can run all my beloved old old programs, therefore I want 4 gb of ram. But what specs can I get that will work for me? My goal is to max out my bus speed to the fastest my chipset/CPUs are capable of. Sorry about the long length of this post... hopefully some kind wise person will educate me. Best regards, Doug
Thanks for the reply! So I can use DDR3-1066 max, which appears to also be called PC3-8500... My Q9400 supports a FSB of 1333, will that be clocked down to 1066?
32 bit Windows is limited to just about 3.2 gb ram, it will not recognize nor use the full 4. There are tricks to use the full 4, but some programs might not function correct.