Opinion & Advice...

One of my systems is old but still very useful for general stuff.

Specs:

• HP Vectra VL420
• P4 1.7ghz
• Intel 845 chipset
• 9800 Pro gcard
• 120gb HD
• Soundblaster PCI 128 sound
• 512mb 133mhz RAM (2 sticks of 256mb each)

I was recently given a 512mb stick of 133mhz RAM and added it to the system for a total of 1gb RAM. I ran some tests on the PC after I installed the new RAM using SiSoft Sandra and noticed that the Speed of the RAM was approximately 700mb per sec with all 3 memory banks (mobo has only 3 banks) populated. I then decided to remove one of the 256mb sticks and have only the 512mb & a single 256mb stick populating bank 0 & bank 1 while leaving bank 2 empty thereby reducing my total RAM to 768mb. I re-ran the tests and noticed that the RAM speed jumped up to approximately 1010mb per sec.

That's almost a 50% increase in speed! I tried different combinations and came to the conclusion that if only 2 RAM banks were populated, the speed was high... if all 3 were filled, the speed dropped???

I updated the mobo to the latest BIOS that is available for it and still the same results.

I'm on a tight budget and suffice it to say, don't want to go buy another 512mb stick of RAM to only populate 2 banks, get 1gb of memory, and have the higher speed.

So, I have 2 questions:

- Have any of you out there ever experienced something like this before and if so, is there a "fix" that allows all 3 banks to be filled but achieve the higher speed.

- If the answer to the above is a "no" then I'd appreciate an opinion:
go for the lower amount of RAM/greater speed or higher amount of RAM/lower speed.

BTW, my son is using this system for light/medium gaming/homework/surfing and we observed that with pretty much all apps, when the system was running with the higher speed configuration, there was a significant difference in responsiveness.

Thanks in advance for any help