Dual channel with 3 sticks of identical ram?

[LIVAN]

My mobo manual says if I fill the 3 dimm slots with identical ram, I still get Dual Channel, is this true?

 

[JeffreyY]

I think your motherboard manual is more reliable than we are But sorry I don't know the answer to your question.

 

[Degrador]

Umm... I'd be extremely suprised if that was true - all your ram needs to run at the same speed, and you can't have part of it dual channel and part not. There's no way to to have all three dimms running in dual channel, so I can't see how this would work. Of course, I'm no motherboard manufacturer, so maybe they've found some get around, but yeah, I'd be suprised.

 

[LIVAN]

I have the ECS nforce board. They have a table saying what gives and what won't give Dual Channel. THey had Dime 1 and 3, Dimm 2 and 3 OR DIMM 1 ,2 AND 3 as being Dual channel active.

Am I misundertanding this?

 

[mechBgon]

While it's counterintuitive on the surface of it, nForce2 can indeed run three modules in dual-channel mode, or dual-DDR mode to be more precise. I talked at more length about it in this thread.

Bigger picture: on nForce2, for nearly anything a home/enthusiast user is doing, dual-DDR is not going to boost performance by more than 2-5%, except for the special case where the person is using nForce2's onboard video, at which point you can expect large improvements in 3D acceleration for gaming compared to a single DDR channel. I use just one memory module on my A7N8X Deluxe at the moment, and if I add more, it'll be the increased amount of memory that I expect to yield improvements, not the dual-DDR aspect of it.

So don't worry about it Plug in your modules and use 'em.