Hey,
I've been using my motherboard and ram for a couple of years now but only just realised that using 2 dual 512mb PC3200 along with a really old 256mb stick is actually slower than using just the two high quality sticks. Someone on another forum says the following - 'RAM has a speed as well. The motherboard will use the speed of the chip with the lowest speed available. If your 256mb stick is slower than the other chips, the other chips will more or less slow down to the speed of the slowest chip. It's a permance loss, but probably less than having 1024 MB ram.'
Is this correct?
If it is, then I could be making it faster, but...
I just looked in my motherboard's manual and it states it has Dual Channel DDR 400 : The 128-bit TwinBank DDR Memory architecture doubles the DDR400 (PC3200) bandwidth. System bottlenecks are eliminated and traffic improved with peak bandwidths of up to 6.4GB/s.
On the ram page of the manual it states - To enhance system performance, utilize dual-channel feature when installing additional DIMMS. You may install the DIMMs in the following sequence: Sockets 1 and 3 or Sockets 2 and 3 or Sockets 1,2 and 3.
Trouble is, I don't understand what it means by socket 3. My motherboards ram sockets are situated like this - http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v465/ThalinRPG/mobo.jpg
So whether they mean socket 3 is socket the second socket 2 i'm not sure! Anyway, I tried putting the ram sticks in Socket 1 and the second Socket 2 (the one on it's own) and I didn't really see any speed difference, and nothing about a Dual Channel DDR 400 feature.
So my questions are, firstly is that person correct about it being faster with just the two high quality sticks, what sockets is the manual on about, and what is this Dual Channel DDR Twinbank feature? Does it need to be enabled in the BIOS or something?
Anyway, sorry if this post is confusing, please help if you can.
I've been using my motherboard and ram for a couple of years now but only just realised that using 2 dual 512mb PC3200 along with a really old 256mb stick is actually slower than using just the two high quality sticks. Someone on another forum says the following - 'RAM has a speed as well. The motherboard will use the speed of the chip with the lowest speed available. If your 256mb stick is slower than the other chips, the other chips will more or less slow down to the speed of the slowest chip. It's a permance loss, but probably less than having 1024 MB ram.'
Is this correct?
If it is, then I could be making it faster, but...
I just looked in my motherboard's manual and it states it has Dual Channel DDR 400 : The 128-bit TwinBank DDR Memory architecture doubles the DDR400 (PC3200) bandwidth. System bottlenecks are eliminated and traffic improved with peak bandwidths of up to 6.4GB/s.
On the ram page of the manual it states - To enhance system performance, utilize dual-channel feature when installing additional DIMMS. You may install the DIMMs in the following sequence: Sockets 1 and 3 or Sockets 2 and 3 or Sockets 1,2 and 3.
Trouble is, I don't understand what it means by socket 3. My motherboards ram sockets are situated like this - http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v465/ThalinRPG/mobo.jpg
So whether they mean socket 3 is socket the second socket 2 i'm not sure! Anyway, I tried putting the ram sticks in Socket 1 and the second Socket 2 (the one on it's own) and I didn't really see any speed difference, and nothing about a Dual Channel DDR 400 feature.
So my questions are, firstly is that person correct about it being faster with just the two high quality sticks, what sockets is the manual on about, and what is this Dual Channel DDR Twinbank feature? Does it need to be enabled in the BIOS or something?
Anyway, sorry if this post is confusing, please help if you can.
