My own belief is that there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers – so on that basis ………

Is there a way to increase the RAM on a Desktop computer, over and above the amount which can be installed in the Motherboard slots?

For example, one can hang all sorts of stuff from a USB Port – is there any way to use that connection for additional RAM?

My old ASUS Motherboard uses RD RAM (RAMBUS) , it would be nice if I could install newer RAM modules somehow!

Any other options – apart from a new Motherboard of course??

Patrick

Vista will allow you to use USB thumbdrives as RAM but for anything else it's always been clumsy attempts that don't work very well. You could check to see if you can swap your existing RAM for DIMMs that each have more capacity if that hasn't already been done.

That's an interesting Question and for sure not a stupid one!

In the past there was Memory-Cards available and for some Server MB's you'll get them even today!

But is this card's useable in "normal" desktop PC's?

USB Flash drives may to slow, even if you use the high speed flash, the speed is limited by the USB port and transfer itself: 480 mbps and thats much slower than the todays RAM!

Maybe there also "Docking-Cards" somewhere? This Cards can be equipped with more than 1 Bank of Memory. They was available when changing a few years ago!

May take a survey to find out!!

Edited January 25, 200719 yr by Reimar

There is no other option to increase RAM that will give you the same performance as your motherboard RAM. All other options are significantly slower, you could just as well increase your paging size. You could try managing your RAM better to free it up.

RAMBUS was known by most people as a dead end... it was proprietary, expensive, slow and used by very few (Intel being the biggest user, and even they dumped it). If you really need to use more RAM, get a new motherboard (and probably new CPU, along with new RAM of course). Considering that RAMBUS died out quite some time ago, even a new budget setup would be faster and wouldn't cost that much.

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Edited January 25, 200719 yr by Clipped

The motherboard design determines the type and max capacity of memory allowed.

If you have reached the limit.....................

Need I say more?

But if its just physical space, not memory limits, denser DIMMs can solve it. For instance, replacing two 128mb DIMMs with 256s.

How much ram and what OS does the original poster have ?

In short: No, it's not possible. There really are no good options to do this - new mainboard costs $70 - $100 so that will be the cheapest option, then you buy some cheap DDRII RAM and be done with it. You might need a new CPU too, but any budget CPU will be faster than your old CPU so no big loss - another $50 - $70.

I just checked some HP systems yesterday and they had full featured desktops for 16,000 baht (with NVidia card, no less!). So a new system may be cheaper and better in the end.

Support for older RAM is generally very bad. I have an old Powerbook which I would like to upgrade the memory for it, but the memory it's using is not being produced anymore so I can only get the same I could have gotten at the time the Powerbook was new, and for the same price or more - extremely expensive compared to current RAM prices.

The lesson is that RAM technology continues to change and reaches its lowest price at the time it becomes obsolete and won't go down in price further.

Yes, Old ram technology is always much more expensive.

Probably due to the fact that they ain't manufactured anymore.

The SD rams (PC 133), are almost twice as expensive as their DDR counterpart for the same amount of memory.