General RAM Question

I quoted a respected site, but I have proven it myself in my own testing as well.
 
hehe,
Yeh I see it's a quote.
I myself have proven my above statements in rigourous performance testing.
 
Angellus said:
AMD does not support DDR2 yet so if you buy now you will be looking for DDR. Or wait till socket AM2 is out because that will support DDR2.

Ntune works with any Nforce board it is Nvidias wn tuning software

Sorry for giving bogus suggestion about DDR 2 then, I thought AMD would support it by now.
Guess they're taking their time, just like they did with PCIE

Ntune does not work with any Nforce motherboard, I've got a gigabyte nforce 4 4x, look at http://www.nvidia.com/content/motherboard_availability/us.asp

Look at the top, ntune support, alot of the nforce 4's don't support Ntune.
 
Last edited:
Sudt said:
Sorry for giving bogus suggestion about DDR 2 then, I thought AMD would support it by now.
Guess they're taking their time, just like they did with PCIE

Ntune does not work with any Nforce motherboard, I've got a gigabyte nforce 4 4x, look at http://www.nvidia.com/content/motherboard_availability/us.asp

Look at the top, ntune support, alot of the nforce 4's don't support Ntune.


Hmmm thats odd I would have though Ntune would be a standard feature of all Nforce Boards. Oh well. My MSI supports it so I don't know why the ASUS and Gigabyte boards on that list dont support it? :confused:
 
dualmeister said:
Nonesence.

Source.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/2gb-ram.html

PCMark05 Overall - highest score 2 x 1GIG



PCMark05 Memory - highest score 2 x 1GIG
3DMark06 - highest score 2 x 1GIG
3DMark06 CPU score - highest score 2 x 1GIG
Sciencemark 2.0 - highest score 2 x 1GIG



WinRAR 3.5 - highest score 2 x 1GIG



MPEG 4 Encoding - best score 2 x 1 GIG
Adobe Photoshop CS - best score 2 x 1 GIG


Adobe Premier Pro - same
3ds max 7.0 - best scores 2 x 1 GIG
Far Cry - best score 2 x 1 GIG
Half Life 2 - best score 2 x 1 GIG
FEAR - best score 2 x 1 GIG
Quake 4 - best score 2 x 1 GIG
SYSMark 2004 SE (various tests) - same and best scores 2 x 1 GIG

None of those programs are high RAM using programs, except the Graphic Design Programs. And The PCmark mem test tests each stick rather than all the Ram as a whole. (more chance of faults in 4 sticks as apposed to 2). Under normal conditions speading the load works alot better, More stable and also means your RAM will last longer.
 
Last edited:
Person said:
None of those programs are high RAM using programs, except the Graphic Design Programs. And The PCmark mem test tests each stick rather than all the Ram as a whole. (more chance of faults in 4 sticks as apposed to 2). Under normal conditions speading the load works alot better, More stable and also means your RAM will last longer.

Sorry but I have to agree with Dualmeister and ED. I myself have 4x512mb sticks and a friend has 2x1GB sticks and from what I can tell the 2sticks are the better option.

Plus with 2 sticks you can run 1T timing as someone mentioned earlier and that does give a little boost to performance.

In the end it comes down to this.

I had 2x512MB sticks so I got 2 more but I if I were buying from scratch I would get 2x1GB sticks. Gives the 1T timing and you have the option of going up to 4GB ram later if you need to.
 
Angellus said:
I had 2x512MB sticks so I got 2 more but I if I were buying from scratch I would get 2x1GB sticks. Gives the 1T timing and you have the option of going up to 4GB ram later if you need to.

Thats your problem they are not all matching.
 
Person said:
None of those programs are high RAM using programs

Are you just making this stuff up now? Have you played Far Cry with 512MB, 1 GIG and 2 GIGS of RAM? On my rig with 512 MB once you exit Far Cry you can sit and watch your desktop icons slowly poping back onto the desktop. With 1GIG of RAM the same happens, but much quicker. With 2 GIGS of RAM exiting Far Cry as taxing as closing a web page. And that is true of all the games I've played.

your RAM will last longer
Please link some proof of this. I have to see it myself :rolleyes: And also considering that a lot of top brands offer a lifetime warranty this is hardly a selling point now is it.

The 4800+ memory controller finally supports running 4 sticks of memory at either 400 MHz and a 2T timing or 333 Mhz at a 1T timing. The previous steppings you could manage 333 MHz at a 2T timing. The intergated memory controller on the Athlon64 has not yet developed to a stage where it can run 4 sticks of 512MB memory at 400 MHz and the optimal 1T timing. This is only possible on like 1 or two motherboards currently such as the DFI LANPARTY UT RDX200 CF-DR, thanks to an optimized BIOS courtesy of Oscar Wu.

This is not a problem with 2 x 1GIG modules.

4 x double bank modules put a lot of extra strain on the Athlon64's memory controller. The only time you should even consider 4 x 512 MB modules over 2 x 1 GIG modules is if you aready have 2 x 512 MB modules and find you can add another 2 x 512 MB modules of the same memory as an upgrade.
 
Last edited:
Yep 1x2GB is much better than 4x512Mb for all the obvious reasons above (execpt for the one where the ram i supposed to last longer)

True that you can run 4x512Mb with 1T timmings on DFI SLI-DR/SLI-D/RDX as I have on a number of occasions, but that took some tweaking to get right.

For benching 2x512MB high speed/tight timming ram is okay, but for games and the like you really want 2x1GB no matter the speed. As 2GB of 3-5-5-11 ram is better than 1GB of 1.5-2-2-5 ram for games. Sure there will be an fps difference in games that are cpu heavy like most OGL games, but the extra ram ill provide a far smoother and more consistant frame rate than 1GB.

In this day and age it's crazy to think of buying 2x512MB over 2x1GB other than for benching and the odd game or so.

:)
 
Person said:
Thats your problem they are not all matching.

Nothing to do with it being different brands the timings on the dimms are 100% the same.
 
Not really. There are timmings that you may not have access to on your board wihch are different on the sticks.
Some boads don't have Row Cycle Time settings and the first 512Mb sticks may tolerate (7ws) while the other set will only handle (10ws) at the same frequency.

eg, Mushkin L2 blk (BH5 version; 2-2-2-5 I think) may not like being in the same system with another set of the same ram but based on the BH6 stuff. (2-2-2-6) Even if you make the settings the same...
Kinda sucks, but it does happen.

I know for a fact that it's not a smart idea to pair WB UTP 2-3-2-6 dimms with Samsung TCC5 even at the same 2-3-2-6 timmings.
 
OK, I bought 2 gb 2 x 1gb corsair.

I have a problem however. When i put the two 1gb's in it starts up to desktop then restarts into the bsod and does a memory dump. It is allocated into the right dual slots. Each one on it's own work correctly.

Any advice?

Thanks
 
I tried it but didn't work. Default is 3.3.3.7. I tried 4.4.3.8. Any other suggestion in terms of the timing?
 
Sorry, I have no idea. My last PC, I could pick three levels of timings of which the middle one worked best. I have never tried to set the individual values.

- You have checked that your motherboard support 2GB etc? I assume it would, but checking.

- Is it a new motherboard or have you had two other memory sticks in it before? The motherboard could be broken.
 
It has the latest bios. I had 2 x 512mb in before. It is an Intel D865Perl MB and supports up to 4gb (4 slots)
 
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X