why does my force2 motherboard have 4 memory slots

[vazel]

why does my ga-7n400-l motherboard have 4 memory slots when all the other nforce2 motherboards only have 3. will this affect performance?

 

[Megatomic]

It allows you to have more memory installed in DCDDR mode. If only more had 4 slots like yours. It's a Gigabyte board, right?

 

[vazel]

yes. it'a gigabyte board. i love it. only prob is onboard sound sux. i'm getting an audigy though.

here's the link to my motherboard's website at gigabyte http://us.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/Products/Products_GA-7N400-L.htm

 

[slpaulson]

Having more memory slots isn't going to hurt anything.
Some boards do have problems running them all filled with double sided memory though.

 

[NokiaDude]

4 DIMMS on nForce2 boards are for two sets of dual channel memory. You can run 1 set of dual channel memory on 3 DIMM nForce2 boards but the 3rd DIMM is useless when running dual-channel.

 

[Odeen]

Not quite.

nForce2 memory controller 1 supports 4 "sides" of memory. This means that you can use two two-sided sticks (512mb and 1gb sticks are generally two-sided, as are older 256mb sticks) of memory in controller 1's slots.

nForce2 memory controller 2 (second channel) supports only 2 sides. Most manufacturers reflect this by only including a single slot (after all, you can't have a 3-sided DIMM)

Gigabyte goes the extra mile by letting you use two sticks of ram on the second channel. However, they have to be single-sided for this to work.

All 6 total "sides" can be filled, and the RAM will still run in dual channel. The Intel i7205/i865/i875 memory controller seems a little more limited, as 3 DIMMs are not allowed to be installed