3rd stick of ram on an nForce2 question

[SunnyD]

Hi guys. I've decided to hold of on upgrading to A64 until the PCIe nForce boards come out later this year. In the mean time, I've been upgrading my system to get the best performance I can out of it. Unfortunately, I'm limited on funds.

One of my initial upgrade choices was going to be RAM and the other was a pair of SATA drives. Well, I opted for the drives first since I was running out of space on my old 40gig. It was an excellent investment - pair of 200gig Seagates in RAID 0. Now I know my bottleneck is the RAM. I have 512meg of Samsung PC2700 (2x256) in dual channel that has been running perfectly. I was planning on getting 2x512 to replace it, but I'm short on the cash right now.

I was wondering, I can get 1 512meg DIMM, and pop it in DIMM 3, but what will this do to performance? Will it even be possible? Then when I can afford it I'd pick up a second (matched) stick and pull the 256's.

Thoughts?

 

[Fern]

Don't see your rig specs. So, I guess you're talking about an nForce chipset-based mobo. If so, yeah it'll work. Here's a link to a thread about three sticks of ram in DC.

 

[SunnyD]

Yep - it's an Asus A7N8X Deluxe 1.04 rev. The samsung dimms are single sided 256meg dimms.

 

[Concillian]

I hae run just about every memory configuration possible with 256 and 512meg DIMMs on an A7N8X-E Deluxe. They all work fine provided you have modules that run well in dual channel. I've mixed brands and sizes etc... and the only problems I had was with some modules that just refused to run in any dual channel configuration.

In your case you want the 2x256 in #1 and #2 (the two close together) with the 512 in #3 (the one further away) This will give dual channel with 512 meg in each channel.

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: Concillian
I hae run just about every memory configuration possible with 256 and 512meg DIMMs on an A7N8X-E Deluxe. They all work fine provided you have modules that run well in dual channel. I've mixed brands and sizes etc... and the only problems I had was with some modules that just refused to run in any dual channel configuration.

In your case you want the 2x256 in #1 and #2 (the two close together) with the 512 in #3 (the one further away) This will give dual channel with 512 meg in each channel.

Ah. Really? That works for me.