Ram Upgrade question

J

jlb

Geek Trainee
Hello,

I am looking for recommendations on how I should upgrade my ram. I currently have the following setup:

Asus A8V-E Deluxe Motherboard
2x 512 Kingston DDR-SDRAM PC3200 (200 MHz) - [DDR-400] @ 3-3-3-8
PCI-E eVGA Geforce 7600 GT KO
and some drives (200GB SATA, 20GB ATA, DVD-R ATA)

I would like to upgrade my ram to at least 2GB. The two DIMMs I have installed now are NOT dual channel. My motherboard has 4 DIMM slots, 2 x 2 dual channel I believe.

Ram setup:
A0 : Empty
A1 (RAS 2, RAS 3) : 512 (Double Bank)
A2 : Empty
A3 (RAS 6, RAS 7) : 512 (Double Bank)

Will I have to trash one of my old DIMMs to free up a slot for the dual channel? Or should I just buy more non-dual channel ram? Maybe replace the non-dual channel all together?

Thanks for your time :cool:
 
Why dont you enable dual channel? Surely you'll see an improvement doing that.

Its not the dimms which are dual channel its the way the chipset and motherboard use the dimms. The only time ive messed with dual channel the bandwidth went up about 1.5gb/s if I remember right.

Its a matter of buying more ram. If you want to use dual channel you'll have to buy 2 sticks. Your chipset supports up to 4gb so another 2x512mb or even 2x1gb?


wow, it took forever to download your manual.
Look at page 2-11.
 
Thanks for the quick reply zeus, the problem is that my ram does not work in dual channel. I have 2x kvr400x64c3a/512, which only fall under column A on the table on page 2-11 (according to the ledgend you need B and/or C to use dual channel).

Can I still re-use this ram or will I have to buy a whole new pair of DIMMs to get up to 2GB?


EDIT::
Turns out my RAM is actually running dual channel right now - I checked CPU-Z and it indicates so (even though page 2-11 says it wouldn't)
Now to upgrade it would be best to buy the same exact DIMMs or would it be ok as long as its 2x 512 @ 3-3-3-8?


Thanks,
-jlb
 
Those tables shown are, I think, just ram they have tested themselves. I did scratch my head over why they stated that some dont work in dual ddr configurations. It doesnt really make sense! Or at least not to me.

In theory you should be able to use any dimms in dual channel but its is probably best to match them.

The only reason they say to use ram with the same cas ratings is because they are assuming you have the ram timings set to auto. If you have a cas 2 dimm and a cas 3 dimm the motherboard may automatically set the timing to 2, which would make the system unstable. The system will only use one set of ram timings, not different timings for each dimm,

Buying two more sticks of what you have already would be a good choice. If its 2gb your wanting then its what you should do.

Just out of interest, what sort of bandwidth are you getting?
 
Using RightMark Memory Analyzer:

Synthetic Tests:
Real Read Bandwidth, MB/s:
3767.02 Average
7152.84 Maximal
Real Write Bandwidth, MB/s:
1748.81 Average
5705.34 Maximal

Performance Test:
Real RAM Bandwidth, MB/s:
2234.10 Average
2455.17 Maximal

I'm interested too - if you know a better bench tool could you please recommend? I'm also not sure if I ran the correct test.. the results seem low...
 
Your bandwidth is pretty good. Ive got normal DDR400 cas3 and get...
Synthetic Tests:
Real Read Bandwidth, MB/s:
2200 Average
2700 Maximal
Real Write Bandwidth, MB/s:
1000 Average
2100 Maximal

Performance Test:
Real RAM Bandwidth, MB/s:
1500 Average
1700 Maximal

Your read test is 1.5gb/s quicker which is similar to what I got with a Asus P4P Deluxe. I cant remember if that was Corsair Value or Crucial now. Though SiSandra gave 4.2gb/s with that setup which was a bit more again.
This tool doesnt seem to be too bad. Its good that it does write tests too. A lot only do read benchmarks. SiSandra is a pretty good benchmark tool but it only does the read tests on ram and harddrives. PCWizard is a free tool but I haven't used the benchmarking part much so I dont know how good it is.
 
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