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Okay, so I built myself a computer and gave my old Dell Demension 8300 to my brother. I kept the hard drives, and, when he went to buy a new one, he got some extra RAM (DDR). Not being very technical himself, he called me over to help. We took an old pair of 256 meg sticks out and put in a new pair of Corsair 512's in. When we powered it on, it just beeped for a while and refused to send any output to the monitor. After some trial and error, we figured out that the board just doesn't like the Corsair RAM at all. I examined the sticks and found that the Corsair was CL2, while the set we had taken out was CL3. Other than that, it didn't' look like there was a major difference. Is this CL- difference the source of the problem?
Please find an user manual or spec sheet for that laptop and see if it can take 512 in one stick. Lower CL is better, so it shouldn't affect your laptop since it should set CL3 if it can't do CL2 for some reason. There's one way that CL2 could be the problem - that is if Corsair didn't program their memory with CL3 timings at all, which I doubt. In this case setting memory timings in bios manually (disable auto-detection) while 256's are in, and then plugging 512's back could be effective. – Kitet – 2014-02-16T22:30:55.350
It's a desktop, not a laptop. – Daniel Stevenson – 2014-02-16T23:05:45.520
This is still true for desktops. – Kitet – 2014-02-16T23:07:54.050
It said it can handle a gig per stick. – Daniel Stevenson – 2014-02-16T23:13:27.397