Memory speed vs. memory quantity

[lamere]

The new Asus board I just got downclocks ram from 400mhz to 333mhz if you fill in more than 2 slots. I find this completly retarded, as the abit board that it just replaced will do dual ddr 400mhz@ 2T command rate.
Question is, I have 3GB total memory, 2x1GB and 2x512 corsair XMS - do you guys think its better to use all of the ram @333mhz or 2GB@400?
Right now, I have 2GB running at 2T command rate but when I put in another 512 or even the full 1GB extra it bumps up to 3T.

I don't know much about overclocking, but I do know that the lower the command rate, the better, and it would be cool to know if it's possible to bump the full 3GB to at least the standard 400mhz.
Thanks!

 

[Bill Clo]

As I recall, you lose about 3% performance going from 1T to 2T. Read on the last page:

http://www.corsairmicro.com/corsair/pro...1_Latency_Settings_and_Performance.pdf

As for the rest, sorry, can't help you.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Depends on whether you're actually doing anything that needs more than 2GB of memory. Even at the lower speed, more memory would be faster than the pagefile, and it's been shown often that having enough memory for your tasks is more important than the speed of the memory. But if you've got an extra gig of physical memory that's just not getting used, then you end up with lower performance for no reason.

What mainboard is this that cuts down the memory speed?

 

[lamere]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Depends on whether you're actually doing anything that needs more than 2GB of memory. Even at the lower speed, more memory would be faster than the pagefile, and it's been shown often that having enough memory for your tasks is more important than the speed of the memory. But if you've got an extra gig of physical memory that's just not getting used, then you end up with lower performance for no reason.

What mainboard is this that cuts down the memory speed?

Good analogy. I don't think I do anything that memory intensive, except gaming.

The board is an Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe. The other board i had was an abit An8 SLI. I wanted to go crossfire due to I use ATI cards anyway, but the actual reason was something happened to the other board when I changed out a 120mm case fan and when I put everything together again I had no display.