So over the last couple of years I've fallen a bit out of practice when it comes to hardware...I'm looking to pick up a Gig of RAM and I'd like suggestions or recomendations.

I have a 2.25 Ghz P4 with Dell Dimension 8200 motherboard with the Intel Tehama i850(E) Chipset. I currently have 512mb PC800 RDRAM with 2 open slots on the board. I want to upgrade to a total of 1.5 gigs RAM but I really am not sure what type of RAM to get or what brand to go with.

I'm also looking to upgrade from my crappy 64mb nVIDIA GeForce 4 MX 420...I haven't decided whether I want to go high end ATI Radeon or mid range Radeon, because I'm probably going to buy a new system in a year when I graduate college (Maybe a laptop though, hence the conundrum!)

Any suggestions are appreciated

Out of Crucial, Kingston, and Corsair, Corsair was the only one that has modules for that board.

CMSS512MBRB72-800 512MB
CMSS256MBRB-800 256MB
CMSS128MBRB-800 128MB


As for your graphics card, with your system you would be wasting money swinging for the fences, you would wind up with a card that would out perform you CPU.

Well there are few programs out there that actually require a processor close to 2.25 Ghz, so I'm not so sure it's a bad thing to have a graphics card of equal power to my cpu...If I buy a new desktop in a year I could always just pull the graphics card out and stick it in there...If I buy a new laptop instead I still want a desktop that will be able to handle the visual requirements of new Windows operating systems, such as Vista LOL. I don't do much gaming on this system anyways...I pretty much keep my gaming exclusive to my Xbox.

i personally have used and really like 4 All Memory

They work great and seem fairly well priced, used 3 times.

There are some realities that you need to consider. The type of RAM needed is Rambus DRAM, a technology that never caught on and is extraordinarily expensive. You will need to spend at least $550 to buy 1GB worth.

The video card type you use is AGP which is now almost obsolete. New systems all use PCI-E, so any new graphics card can not be used in any new system. Still, a new mid-level graphics card should be well worth it.

Yeah as I was researching I noticed that...sort of sucks but I'm looking into building a new system down the road. For now I'll probably just add 256 - 512 mb of RAM as opposed to a gig, and then buy a fairly cheap $100 AGP ATI graphics card. It should keep this system very decent as a home work station for quite some time.

It's funny because when I bought this computer it was like the best thing going that Dell had to offer...I bought it for the sole purpose of being able to upgrade it down the road...little did I know, Dell cases/power supplies are a pain in the butt, no one uses RDRAM so I can't just get a new motherboard/case without replacing all of the RAM, and I can only upgrade my cpu by a couple 100 Mhz if I don't replace the motherboard...it's always such a pain trying to plan for future upgrades because technology changes so fast!