Off brand RAM for Cisco 4331

[dlots]

Working on a budget here, we have a Cisco 4331 and need it to have alot of RAM... sadly the RAM is more expensive than the router was, as such I am looking for off brand RAM that works with it.  I tried DDR3-1600 which I thought would work, but no luck.

Anyone else tried this?

[Fred]

I've used off-brand RAM at home for labs (not in a 4331), but never in production use.

[wintermute000]

if you can afford a 4331 and you need enough RAM to do full tables, you can afford real RAM

[packetherder]

off-brand? real RAM? wat?

I get the whole it's easier and less risky to just order the cisco part, but you guys are talking like this stuff isn't sourced from an OEM who sells the exact same product w/o the exorbitant markup.

dlots, you could take a factory DIMM and put it in a machine and run something like dmidecode and get its specs. I would've assumed anything that fit in the DDR3 slot would've worked, but maybe the mainboard calls for a certain clock-rate or ECC.

[SimonV]

Can you take out the current DIMMs and check the part number? You should be able to find the tech specs online

[dlots]

I tried some ECC DDR3 that was a no-go
I didn't know about dmidecode, I'll see about giving that a shot.
I looked for the part number of the ram online the manufacturer doesn't even list that part number on their website.

If we just needed a few gigs for normal router stuff that would be fine, but the 4331 has a nifty setup where you can run VMs on one of the cores, sadly to get enough ram to make this worthwhile the RAM would end up costing us more than the 4331, and we don't even know if it will work yet hence why i am trying to get it working so we can do some testing.

[Fred]

off-brand? real RAM? wat?

I get the whole it's easier and less risky to just order the cisco part, but you guys are talking like this stuff isn't sourced from an OEM who sells the exact same product w/o the exorbitant markup.

Oh, you're absolutely right that Cisco sells the same chips at a 10x markup. I could try to justify that markup by saying it probably goes through some tighter QA to make sure it's within some very narrow tolerances, but I don't think I believe it. What I do believe is that why it might save a couple thousand in the short term, going with unsupported memory could cause extreme downtime in the future when it breaks and you can't get support, and that would likely cost more than the upfront cost of going with Cisco branded chips.

Cheap at the beginning, expensive in the long run.