4 sticks of RAM

[dv8silencer]

I have repeatedly seen talk about how 4 sticks of RAM will "stress the NB" etc.
Can someone please elaborate on what this means? I guess this means you usually have to up the voltage to get the memory stable? Why does it stress the NB so much? Does anyone have specific experience with this subject?

 

[n7]

I'll let someone with more expertise explain the technicalities of why it's much harder on the NB, but i can attest it does indeed make things more difficult when overclocking.

If running stock, it's really not difficult.
There are many many OEMs that use all four dimms, or that can be upgraded to four dimms without so much as a hiccup.
I've personally never seen any issues with four dimms running stock.

It's when you overclock that i see & have experienced more hassles.

Generally for running lower speeds 1:1, it's not too bad if you have a solid motherboard.

But you simply will not see the sky high speeds you can get with 2 dimms when you run 4 dimms when you start looking for speeds like DDR2-1000, DDR2-1100, etc.

I wish i could say that DDR3 is going to change this, but it looks like the same story for DDR3 thus far.

Now once Intel switches to QPI, this shouldn't be as big of an issue in theory, but considering even AMD systems with the IMC have had trouble with four dimms vs. two, it might still be a concern.

 

[dv8silencer]

So you would say that a person running four 2GB DDR2-800 at their marketed timings and voltage shouldn't worry

 

[n7]

Not likely.

I shoulda worded things a bit differently though.

I was thinking more along the lines of defaults for CPU & RAM, meaning RAM @ default JEDEC vdimm, 1.8V, which most DDR2-800 kits are not.

That said, it's still unlikely you're going to see any issues with DDR2-800.
Even if it does need a small bump in voltage to the NB/MCH, or perhaps vdimm, or perhaps slightly loosened timings, that's about the worst you'd see.



/Okay, you can have worse, like with my motherboard + this 8 GB Mushkin, where i cannot stably run anything but 2:3, but i'll not get into the ugly details... >_>