ram

I have no experience with DDR2 (yet) but as far as I know running 3 sticks is no different than running 2 or 4 if they are the same brand, speed etc... Although I am sure there are some people who will like to work in matched pairs etc...

If you have PC2-4300 and put PC2-4200 in your system in conjunction, you will lose performance (although gain performance due to larger capacity - why don't you just get more 4300?). You can't run different speeds on different slots.

Dropping a third stick into a dual channel system is DUMB because it will stop dual channel from working!

In order for DC to work, there must be an even number of memory sticks, and they must be in the correct slots.

You'll be dropping your theoretical bandwidth from 6.4GB/s down to 3.2GB/s.

I don't think you can run dual channel with 3 sticks of memory, you need matching sticks in corresponding slots, if three slots are occupied that third stick doesn't have anything in the corresponding slot and can't be run in dual channel, since the two channels are not equal anymore. Resulting in single channel operations and much less memory bandwidth.

1. running 3 sticks of ram is a bad choice. the best config for winxp-32bit is 2 1GB dimms in dual channel operation. note. dual channel need 2 gigs of the same type of ram. they do not need to be matched pairs but it helps. runninig 3 sticks may also prevent you from using 1t command rate. i'm not sure on that though as ia haven't used ddr2. thg had an article about ddr2 recently so do a quick article search.

2. with ddr pc3200 means that it has a bandwidth of 3200MB/S. if the same is true of DDR2 4300 will have a 100MB bandwidth advantage over pc4200.

3. afaik ram always runs at the speed of the slowest ram. the performance loss would hardly be noticable in real world situations.


finally don't trust me as im a noob