2gb pc3200 will only run @ 333 in A8NSLI-Dlx. ?

[Nellinc]

Hi,
i threw another gig of pc3200 in my asus a8nsli deluxe (1006-bios) and now my memory onlyruns @ 333..anyone else have this issue? TIA, Nell

 

[Nellinc]

i noticed in the faq on asus' site it says you can manually set the speed...i can onlyset the "max" am i missing something?

 

[Waylay00]

Well are your running 4x512MB sticks? If so, it will result in 333mhz memory speeds. This happens with all NF4 and NF3 boards. The Rev. E (Venice) Core AMD 64's are supposed to fix this though.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

This is normal
Unfortunetly the limitation is with the on-die memory controller on the current revision chips, and it applys to all A64 motherboards. With 4 sticks it will always drop to DDR333 and a 2T command rate which is actually much worse than the DDR333 speed.

The drop from DDR400 to DDR333 is rumored to be fixed with the improved memory controllers in the new Venice and San Diego core chips that are being released in a couple of weeks. But I'm pretty sure you will still have 2T with 4 sticks.

Bottom line, there is always a performance penalty for using 4 sticks. 2 x 1024 is much better than 4 x 512 performance wise, but also much more expensive.

*edit*
Somebody should come up with a way to toggle between 2sticks/4sticks in Windows. Then you could run 1gb when overclocking, gaming, and normal apps, and switch over to 2gb to run memory intensive proggies, like video encoding, web hosting, etc...

 

[Peter]

This actually is a limitation in how DDR400 was calculated and defined. It's actually only good for one DIMM, if you want to be safe across the entire temperature range.
Yes AMD are apparently doing something about it, pushing the limits a bit further out.

But the _actual_ performance delta - outside pure memory benchmarks - isn't even big enough to scratch one's head about.

 

[ribbon13]

Performace and budget solutions.

 

[Nellinc]

hmm,
well i'm just gonna return that second gig then...i see no discernable difference in my gaming or benchmarks. I think I'll wait for a sale and buy 2 1gb sticks. I notice that all of the matched pairs have higher cas latency ratings...why is that?