By all means although unless you are on windows XP64 I dont think your pc see's more than 2GB so although it would not do anything really bad it aint gonna do much good either

besides anything more than 2 sticks while overclocking tends to have an adverse effect from what I am told............. if I was you I would just run the 2x1Gb sticks mate

 

running more then 2 sticks of ram taxes the memory controller on amd chips, the ram will be set to pc2700 speeds to take a load of the memory controller as well as losing dual channel.
The max memory WinXP can see is 3gb i believe, dont quote me onti though.

 

I think it's 2.75GB for regular 32bit XP.

I'd advise against it. 2 Gigs is enough for anything out there, and your RAM will run at slower speeds if you do all 4 sticks.

 

Just use the 2X1gb sticks. That is better than the cheap 1gb ram. Plus the 2gb has lower timings.
Also I have patriot ram, and they work great!

 

Just use the 2X1gb sticks. That is better than the cheap 1gb ram. Plus the 2gb has lower timings.
Also I have patriot ram, and they work great!

 

XP works with up to 4GB, but only recognizes up to 3.5GB. I read that in a couple of places. And does the RAM get slowed if you are using all 4 sticks on an AMD only? Because I was thinking of doing almost the same thing to my Intel comp.

 

It slows down any config, evan Intel, and there is no real use for 3 gigs of ram. 2 gigs suffice largely evan for games like FEAR or BF2 wich are the most demanding I know. Win actualy can manage 4 gigs of ram from wich 2 gigs are being used for the windows proceses, and 2 gigs for the others. There is no way this can be changed, and unless you are using winX64 wich can use quite a lot of ram there is no point in buying that 2x512 set.

 

so if i was to use win 64 or vista (when it comes out) it would 4 sticks run better or is the ram slowed by the chipset and not the os

 

I'm gonna give an example, maybe i'll be clearer, at the same amount of ram, let's say 2gigs, 2 sticks of 1 gig each will always be better than 4*512. The first athlon64 cores, the clawhamers/newcastle couldn't handle 4 sticks of ram @400, the memory controler didn't support that. The latter revisions improved this, but now A64 can't run 4 sticks of ram at 1T memory setting wich gives a serious penalty in games. Besides 3 gigs of ram brig no benefits in games, but you will be forced to use 2T setting and the performance would degrade.

Win x64 or any other OS that uses 64 bit (I suppose Vista will) simply eats twice as much ram. 64bit is twice 32bit, it's as simple as that. So, since XP+BF2 sees improvement when passing from 1 gig to 2 gigs, under XP64+BF2 you may see an improvement from 2 to 3 gigs. However i doubt it, since your memory will still work on 2T, so the possibe benefit would be small, so the memory controller will slow it down, not the OS.

 

You can run 4 sticks in Dual Channel, or so says my manual...

I thought 4*512 was better than 2*1024 because 512 sticks have better timings than 1024's

 

yeah you can provided that each pair is matched although both pairs can be different although at that point you will probably lose abit of performance....................DUAL CHANNEL is built into the motherboard its not the actual RAM, you cant get a pair of 2x1gb dual channel ram just 2 identical sticks which will work in dual channel

**Sorry for rant, hung over**

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by noxious89123 You can run 4 sticks in Dual Channel, or so says my manual... I thought 4*512 was better than 2*1024 because 512 sticks have better timings than 1024's

You can get better performance when using 4*512 as oposed to 2*1024 only if the 2*1024 sticks have real bad timings, and frankly I don't see how bad can they be to cause a bigger performance hit than using 2T, wich is mandatory with 4 sticks. Some memory bandwidth benchmarks should prove my point, but I don't have dual channel, so I can't do it, something like 2*1024 2.5-4-4-9 1T vs 4*512 2-2-2-5 2T... Should be intresting

 

What is the whole 1T, 2T thing? Its something i've never really understood. explain please

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by dragosmp frankly I don't see how bad can they be to cause a bigger performance hit than using 2T, wich is mandatory with 4 sticks.

That's not true. The DFI Expert can run 4 sticks at 1T CPC.

 

So what IS 1T / 2T???