2 GB in 2 slots vs 4 GB in 4 slots

[BluePhoenix]

well I heard something about using all 4 slots being bad, why is this, what does it do?

thanks

[gsteinb88]

The athlon 64's memory controller cannot support 4 doublesided chips and still maintain a 1T timing. Therefore, it drops to 2T, which iirc translates to about a 40% performance drop.
[offtopic]What the heck do you need 4gb of ram for?
-g

[Mastericy]

The AMD64 can't use the 1T timing with 4 DIMMS, however it can make use of all 4GB of RAM. This could make up for that 40MHz if you were actually doing something that intensive, which I doubt you will be.

[BluePhoenix]

so unless I dont need 4 GB of ram another set of sticks WILL slow down my ENTIRE system performance even if I am only using 2 of the 4 sticks???

thanks alot

[hcbassplay]

Yes, I think you would be best off spending the extra on two really, really good 1gb sticks instead of four good 1gb sticks...

[BluePhoenix]

hermm,,, kkk thanks

[repoman]

Just so you know, 2T won't hurt that bad, it will take away around 1000MB/s. Sounds like a lot, but that's 1000MB/s that you don't need, as long as you end up over 5000MB/s either way. Which you will have if you're running over say DDR440 2.5-3-3 2T

Unless of course you're using a dualcore chip, you need all the bandwidth you can get for it to not be a bottleneck

But you won't need the 4GB now, unless you're doing crazy video editing or something, I don't know. You'll always have room to upgrade though.

BTW little suggestion on ram- crucial ballistix pc4000 you can probably get 280mhz 3-3-3-8 with it

[BluePhoenix]

well for choosing ram... ill be using a DFI lanparty board so I belive it has to be PC3200 or something, and I hope to be using a dual core amd

[Lucius]

Nah, PC3200 is the standard you can use higher as long as its DDR instead of DDR2. For example you can use PC4400 and it should allow you to overclock higher aswell. Anyway...you don't need 4GB the most any game uses is 2GB and thats as far as I know only BF2 at the moment. 4GB is mainly for extremely large applications such as some CAD and video editing etc....

[BluePhoenix]

what is meant by the "standard"

??

[repoman]

default...

[BluePhoenix]

wow, ok