My rams died! Need a new one

yeh, so anyways i bought a 1 gig 3200DDR chip a while ago and it never worked! Running it by itself the computer wouldnt boot, running it with my 512mb stick i could either get the PC to detect 1 gig or to detect the 512, never the full 1.5 gig and the 1 gig would never work by itself. Now that's how it came when i got it, so i was worried it was my motherboard or choice of ram and not just dodgy ram.



I have a 1 year warranty on the ram but i couldnt be botherred driving for 30 minutes to get a new one so i was planning on buying some at work.



i recently bought a 7600GT and while i can run games like prince of persian: the two thrones and such on max graphics, my PC really struggles on games like FEAR.



So i'm assuming the 512mb of ram isn't enough for games like FEAR, correct?



Anyways, i just wanted to know whether i should get SD or DDR ram and what speed i should get. I'm assuming 2 gig is enough. My motherboard is only about 8 months old and is pretty decent (it has 3 fans on it!!)



Anyway my PC specs are:

512mb of working ram, 1 gig of broken ram

7600GT 256mb card

AMD Athlon 3700+ san diego

250 gig hdd (it's pretty new so i assume pretty fast, don't know if a reformat will help on speed in games, maybe it would)

MSI, K8N DIAMOND SLI PLUS motherboard



Also, for some reason, even though i have all sorts of weird and cool overclocking features on this motherboard, i can't overclock the host clock on the cpu, only the fsb, which is annoying because i know these chips are pretty overclockable

OK so after reading alot of stuff, i found out that all the different ram types i was looking at were either too fast or had the wrong number of pins, was lucky because i think i just saved myself $200 bucks



my mobo only supports 266/333/400 and doesn't support DDR2, only dual channel. (184 pin)



I'm curious to find out if ram faster than 400 will work, in that it'll just be slowed down

Firstly, fear will lag on your computer no matter how much ram you throw at it period. I have 2GB of DDR800 ram and a 7900GT, and Fear still lagged when MAX graphics was turned on.

Regarding your ram question, the fastest DDR ram is 400 Mhz, any ram that goes higher will take a different slot. If you look carefully at a DDR and DDR2 stick and lined them up, you would have seen that the middle gap is at a different place, that is to stop novice users sticking in the wrong RAM. I'm afraid the faster RAM your motherboard can take is 400Mhz DDR ones.

ahh ok i wasn't quite sure if DDR went above 400mhz, i guess not.



So thats the case on fear ¬¬ damnit, i wanted max graphics, i don't even like the game but i wanted it to look cool.. My old 1 gig of ram on my old 6300gs ran it pretty well with most settings on high but not max so i was hoping for max. starting to wish i didn't sell my xbox360, 1k on pc graphics parts is nothing compared to the $750 on a gaming console.. Desktops need to start making some rapid advances damnit, they used to have the best graphics ¬¬