Member Avatar for Roebuc

I am helping a friend with her Dell computer and she has some kind of RAM in there I have never seen before. She has 4 slots, with 2 256 sticks and 2 sticks that seem to just be fillers. However, if you remove the fillers and have an open slot, it will not work. They are not actualy memory as it has not circuits on it, just flimsy plastic that says DELL across it. It does have pins though.....Also the RAM she has in there has two slits in the middle of the stick, I have never seen that before. It seems to be less than 240-pins but I am not sure to be honest. She was wanting to buy some more to have a full gig, but I can not find anything like it on newegg. Any ideas what kind of ram this might be? Thanks.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by jbennet

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Member Avatar for Maulth

I looked around google, and I found nothing. I did about 5 min of searching. It may be that I was using bad keywords, but I've never heard of this either, and I build computers on the side of my real job. I would suggest you try and contact a dell representative and see what they have to say about it. Have you tried removing the "fake" ram and replacing it with an actual stick?

Member Avatar for Roebuc

Well, I only have the two stick that are allready in there to move around, but yes, I can move them around and it still works. I just can not of an empty slot for RAM to go in, it has to have something in every slot to work. I have just never seen anything like it.

Member Avatar for Sil23

What your looking at is an older type of RAM used in P3 systems, (and even some early P4 stuff, but intell had a ton of problems utilizing it). The blank sticks are called CRIMMs, and are used to help a Rambus system terminate, or complete its circuit. The RAM is RDRAM and comes in either 168 or 184 pin.

commented: Thanks for the info! +1
Member Avatar for jbennet

RAMBUS ram is expensive as hell as its discontinued. You are cheaper buying a new pc

commented: Thanks for the info! +1
Member Avatar for Roebuc

Thanks.....I told her what I found out. She bought that PC in 2003 I think. I bought 2 pcs, one in 2001 and the other in 2004 and My PC's do not have this RAM, I have never seen it before. What was the point of it, I understand the whole circuit thing, but to be so short lived and so inefficient, where were they tring to go with it?

Member Avatar for jbennet

it is efficient. It was used because it was a lot faster than standard SDRAM, . When DDR came out though, it was much cheaper, so RAMBUS died. It also had licencing issues. You can still find it in quite a lot of old servers though.

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