Huge RAM QUESTION!!

[btdvox]

Hi there I was having a problem before, with my new RAM, i just bought a 1024 and had a 512 Ram, and it turns out that in my benchmarks, when i put a single stick of ram in, my benches were very high on pcmark 04 and 3d mark 01, but when i put both in, my marks went down by like 100-200 points,
well people said that because of having more memory than you needed or memory cache the marks would go down but in reality there actually higher when playing games load times would be faster. Well my load times did get faster by quite a bit BUT I just read in my manual that because both the RAM sticks are double sided memory, the memory speed would go down!
It says MSI Reminds You.... the maximum memory speed decreases when both DIMM1 and DIMM2 slots are installed with double-sided memory modules.

Now the Question Does that mean it would be better for me to keep the 1024 Ram and then get a 256 single sided RAM Stick? I would save 20 bucks too! haha. Please let me know.

 

[btdvox]

anyone? should i just keep the ram i have or should i change it to 256 and get a faster memory speed, but lower MB?

 

[GuitarDaddy]

You will likely get the best scores and performance with just the 1024k stick. The vast majority of games and apps can't utilize over 1gb

 

[btdvox]

really? Battlefield 2 needs reccomends acutally 2GB! lol , i think im going to excahgne it for the 256. but one question how can i find out if my mobo supports DDR2?

 

[Kogan]

I wouldn't worry about 3dmark too much. I can fudge my 3dmark05 score by 100-200 points just by tweaking the video card driver. I'd much rather have 1.5gb of ram than 200 points in 3dmark.

DDR2 is only on intel motherboards at the moment (I think).

And play around with your ram timings/speed if you haven't done so already. Even cheap pc3200 ram can be overclocked a little

 

[SrGuapo]

Originally posted by: btdvox
how can i find out if my mobo supports DDR2?

You are using a Prescott based Pentium 4 processor and your RAM slots are longer than normal DDR (240 pins IIRC). If you are using DDR, you cannot use DDR2. They are not backwards compatible.

 

[btdvox]

So you think I should just keep the RAM, because in my MOBO manual it says double sided Memory Modules, will decrease the memory speed. so i was just thinkin of buying a 256 RAM and trading in the other.