Mixing old and new RAM

Firstly I'm new at this. Not a very computer-ish person. So I very much apologize if this is not the right place, but here it goes..

My Motherboard is an Asus P5LD2-SE. I'm running in Win 7 Ultimate 32-bit(x86) OS, 1GB RAM (2x512 MB).

I'm planning to upgrade my OS to 64-bit and because I know my Motherboard is a dual-channel, I bought a dual-channel 2 GB RAM (2 pcs). Am I still able use my old RAM ones, since it is 4 slots? Which in the end will show 5GB. Is it possible?

winterwindz

Posted 2010-05-15T14:16:47.120

Reputation: 45

Answers

According to the Asus P5LD2-SE manual, the board supports a maximum of 4GB of RAM.

ThatGraemeGuy

Posted 2010-05-15T14:16:47.120

Reputation: 3 088

I didn't bother to read manual because I thought it was useless, but now i know why they invented the manual. LOL Thank you for your help. – winterwindz – 2010-05-15T20:16:25.187

Theoretically, yes. There may potentially be BIOS or chipset issues, but Asus is at least somewhat decent and usually does not suffer from those.

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

Posted 2010-05-15T14:16:47.120

Reputation: 100 516

What did you mean by potentially Bios or chipset issues? Will it damage my motherboard or just the Operating System issues as is not recognizing,etc? Or should i just not add the old ones? thx – winterwindz – 2010-05-15T15:00:21.990

@winterwindz: you are unlikely to cause damage to the board or memory modules, at worst your system will fail to boot and give you a (maybe cryptic) error message stating the reason. As per my comment, Asus state the maximum memory configuration on that board as 4GB. – ThatGraemeGuy – 2010-05-15T15:12:54.353

It may not recognize modules above a certain size, or only be able to address them to a certain amount. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams – 2010-05-15T15:13:16.503

@Graeme Donaldson and Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams: I understand now. Thank you both very much. – winterwindz – 2010-05-15T20:14:02.897