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Fedora 14 HP Netbook 210 Mini
My netbook had 1 GB of DDR3 memory. However, that wasn't enough. So I decided to replace the 1 GB with a 2GB or DDR3.
However, what command can I issue to be sure that I am using DDR3.
I tried the following cat /proc/meminfo
However, it didn't list any information about DDR3.
Is there some other command I can use?
Many thanks for any suggestions.
ant2009
Posted 2010-12-11T05:45:31.853
Reputation: 2 595
23
Running dmidecode or lshw should show the type. Might require root privileges to check, however.
Sathyajith Bhat
Posted 2010-12-11T05:45:31.853
Reputation: 58 436
@DavidSchwartz, your comment is wrong and your link is dead. Instead of posting such tiny comments, consider posting an answer of your own with more details than can fit in the tiny comment field. :) (For example, if dmidecode were inaccurate, what would you use instead? That would make a good answer.) – Quuxplusone – 2015-03-17T23:32:26.490
@Quuxplusone The comment was correct and the link was live when it was made. Unfortunately, you can't edit comments years later, so it's impossible to keep them up to date. If I had better information at the time, I would have left an answer rather than just a comment. But I didn't, and I felt it was important to warn anyone reading the answer that they couldn't rely on the information dmidecode gives. – David Schwartz – 2015-03-17T23:51:01.653
to just get memory info, you can use dmidecode -t memory or lshw -c memory – pd12 – 2016-12-15T16:26:37.317
If dmidecode doesn't list DDR anywhere, can I infer this information from any other bits of data? – palswim – 2018-02-14T06:52:08.203
Found it using dmidecode. However, lshw return 'command not found'. – ant2009 – 2010-12-11T07:32:58.817
It is well known that dmidecode is inaccurate in reporting memory information. See here
13
According to https://askubuntu.com/questions/18372/how-can-i-find-out-what-ram-a-computer-system-has , the one-liner you're looking for is
sudo lshw -short -C memory
This will spit out something along the lines of
H/W path Device Class Description
===========================================================
/0/0 memory 64KiB BIOS
/0/4 memory 256KiB L1 cache
/0/5 memory 1MiB L2 cache
/0/6 memory 8MiB L3 cache
/0/7 memory 8200MiB System Memory
/0/7/0 memory 4GiB DIMM DDR3 Synchronous
/0/7/1 memory DIMM [empty]
/0/7/2 memory 4GiB DIMM DDR3 Synchronous
/0/7/3 memory DIMM [empty]
/0/7/4 memory 8MiB FLASH
Be aware that the human-readable string (4GiB DIMM DDR3) is self-reported by the RAM and/or BIOS, so it isn't in any standardized format. If you're really lucky, it will explicitly say DDR3 or DDR4. Otherwise, if it indicates a frequency in MHz, you can try to distinguish based on that.
From Wikipedia:
DDR1: 2.5 V, 133–200 MHz
DDR2: 200–400 MHz
DDR3: 1.5 V, 400–800 MHz (up to 1400 MHz for super-high-end)
DDR4: 1.2 V, 2133–4266 MHz
For example: My other computer's DDR4 RAM shows up in lshw -short -C memory as simply 16GiB DIMM Synchronous 2133 MHz (0.5 ns). The MHz rating indicates that it's almost certainly DDR4.
Quuxplusone
Posted 2010-12-11T05:45:31.853
Reputation: 227
2
Here's the exact way to find out whether you have DDR2 or DDR3 Memory on Debian or Ubuntu systems:
sudo dmidecode | grep DDR
It will return something like this:
Type: DDR3
Or you can do this:
sudo lshw | grep DDR
It will return a bit more information, like this:
description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1600 MHz (0.6 ns)
You're welcome.
Apofis
Posted 2010-12-11T05:45:31.853
Reputation: 41
As noted in the comment posted more than two years ago, to Sathya's answer posted more than three years ago, dmidecode is inaccurate. And lshw wouldn't work for the original poster. – ChrisInEdmonton – 2014-04-24T00:12:01.267
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Use this to find type and speed of RAM on Linux:
sudo dmidecode --type 17|agrep -i 'speed|size|type'
Tested on Cent OS, Fedora, RHEL, Scientific Linux
Angsuman Chakraborty
Posted 2010-12-11T05:45:31.853
Reputation: 111
1Have you tried
dmidecode? – Malabarba – 2010-12-11T06:20:56.680