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Will running 4x1b PC6400 sticks hinder my cpu performance?

T

TmBlackFlag

Senior member
I am installing 4x1gb sticks of G.Skill PC6400 and overclocking my e2140. I will not be raising the FSB past 400Mhz so I was wondering if there is any performance drawback to running 4 sticks instead of two.

Thanks in advance.
 
You will more than likely need to increase voltage on your northbridge to be stable while running 4x1gb.
 
That is okay with me, but i thought i remember reading long ago that running 4 sticks instead of 2 sticks presented some performance problems related to dual channel mode
 
Since your goal and/or limit is 400MHz, I'm sure you'll be fine. I'm running 8GB @~764Mhz.

I have some G.Skill 6400 as well, I was able to get it to 1050MHz btw.
 
you might have to set the command rate to 2T which lowers the memory performance quite a bit, but mostly on benchmarks, not real life apps/games.
 
I just bought myself another 2 gigs of ram and have a total of 4 gigs on my Asus M2N-E which is very picky on the ram and also has a very low limit of Vdim of only 1,95V, and the thing is that I have the same overclock then before the upgrade on my Brisbane 4000+. I didn't changed any voltage or anything at all. So I guess I was probably lucky or there isn't any problem at all running all the ram slots occupied.
 
4x1GB makes it more finicky because of the northbridge has to work harder to keep things all 4 modules in sync in the dual channel. It all depends on your board spec. Typically P35 has native support up to 1333, which means 667mhz ram speed. You should be fine with that, but raising it above it may cause issue. I have 2x2GB with my P35, with only 2 sticks it reduces stress on northbridge, but the higher density ram also limits performance, and forcing memory to run at 2T. I can hit 400mhz just fine, but that's a combination of my DDR2-800 memory and IP35E board.

Bottomline is that more than 2x1 ram will result in slight performance hit, whether you go 4x1 or 2x2, but it's not much of a hit so I wouldn't worry about it.


 
Yep, loosen your timing on 4 sticks especially if you running at 667-800mhz. I managed to get 4-4-4-12-2T with 2x2Ghz, but that's only working at around 500mhz. Mine needed 5-5-5-15-2T at 800mhz to be fully stable.
 
You'll lose a bit of performance running on 4 sticks, but if you have good quality RAM, like D9 or something, the benefit of 4x1gb over 2x2gb is much greater than the loss.
 
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