The end of the story:
I bought a PC-2700 512MB memory module, ran memtest version 3.1a (thanks to Ira for the tip) before and after swapping the memory modules. Tests 1-7 passed, and now I am working with 512MB memory.
I plan to run the full memtest test suite later tonight.
Thanks to all who replied and assured me that PC-2700 usually can work in place of PC-2100 (albeit at PC-2100 speeds).
Unfortunately, a bay for swapping hard disks prevents installation of memory module in two of the three memory sockets in the motherboard, so I could not try to use the PC-2100 256MB memory module. So the question whether they would have cooperated with the motherboard is still open.
By the way, according to memtest, for my 1.7GHz P4 processor, the speeds are as follows:
L1 cache (8K) - 13933MB/Sec (both 256MB and 512MB configurations)
L2 cache (256K) - 11886MB/Sec (both configurations)
Memory - 819MB/Sec for the PC-2100 module
809MB/Sec for the PC-2700 module
In other words:
1. I lost 1.2% of the memory bandwidth. Reasonable price to pay for the benefit of reducing to zero my swap space usage.
2. The L1 and L2 cache bandwidths are close to each other. This is contrary to my intuition.
Ira Abramov wrote:
Quoting Omer Zak, from the post of Tue, 31 Aug:
Thus, if the PC-2700 cannot work with my motherboard (with or without PC-2100), I'll lose. This is why I asked in this mailing list.
well, I have ran together 66Mhz and 100 in the same board and 100 with 133 and it was just fine. 133Mhz dimms in a 66Mhz bus have mixed results depending on make.
I would look for a store that would be sympathetic to your problem, and let you return the module if it fails after a few minutes or hours of memtest or memtest+. all other methods that do not include such an empiric test are educated guesses and quoted manufacturer's best practices at best.
I say mix and match. Hail Discordia!
--- Omer My own blog is at http://www.livejournal.com/users/tddpirate/
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