The Crucial PC2100 DDR works flawlessly on both mainboards, with no compatibility problems at all. The Mushkin PC2100 DDR had no problems with the AMD 760 based gigabyte board, however caused some major problems with our ALi MaGiK 1 Iwill board. As it seems, the board failed to boot properly when we used the Mushkin RAM. Despite trying a large number of timings, and settings this RAM failed to work correctly. Whether this was a problem solely with the Iwill board, or the ALi MaGiK 1 chipset was impossible to determine though I'd point my finger at the latter. After chatting with tech support for Mushkin they confirmed that the RAM should have worked on that board as it was advertised on their website as such.

Despite not working while in the board alone, the Mushkin DDR Ram did mysteriously work when a stick of Crucial DDR RAM was used. This was quite possibly the weirdest computer anomaly I ever came across. Perhaps the board did not initialize the RAM correctly alone or was particularly temperamental I can only guess. My best guess on the other hand would be that as Mushkin sent us an early sample of this RAM (which they said was retail however) might have been malfunctioning, though why would it work with the Gigabyte board then? Compatibility wise the Crucial wins this round as it worked perfectly in both board as previously stated.

Go RAM go!

When one overclocks their FSB (front side bus) they will push the RAM at higher than specified speeds, therefore creating the possibility of causing malfunctions and instability. Before you dive into the depths of overclocking you would definitely want to look into purchasing RAM specifically designed to support higher bus speeds, or at least buy quality name brand ram as they often have better fabrication methods and therefore tend to produce better modules.

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