Question about the performance of memory with 3 or 4 sticks.

[nukie83]

Hi,

My system info is as the below:

X2 5000+ Black Box
ASUS M2A-VM mATX
Cosair 430W
Seagate 7200.10
1GB OCZ Platinum 4-4-4-15 X2


I am wondering about how memory works with different number of sticks.

If i put 2 X OCZ 4-4-4-12 1GB sticks, they automatically work as dual channel rite?

Is that better than 2 sticks of the same kind of memory + 1 other speed/clock memory?

So is 2 of same memory better than 2 of same memory + 1 of different kind?

Also, i was told that if I put 4 GB memory, it only shows up to be 3.25 GB or so in XP. Is there any slow down from using the computer that way?
Even though the computer only shows 3.25 GB, does it still work as fast as 2 dual channels working?

Thanks in advance.

 

[daft]

it will still work as dual channel, the thing is that because XP is almost always a 32bit OS, it can only recognize around 3.2-3.5GB of ram. but just to make sure of compatibility, get ram that is of the same clock and timings, sometimes it can cause a crash if it has different timings.