GA-P31-DS3L Memory question.

[Leolian]

Hi guys,

I have a GA-P31-DS3L motherboard and I'm looking to pick up a q6600 to breathe some life back into it. I currently have 2 x 1gb corsair twinx ram installed and I want to go up to 4gb. The gigabyte website and various forums suggest that this mobo will not take 4 x double sided ram modules as the voltage drain is too high, but the list of compatible ram has only a couple of 2gb modules listed. I am planning on picking up 4 x 1gb value ram from crucial that is guaranteed compatible, but will this limit performance compared to say 2 x 2gb quality ram off ebay? Does anyone know if this mobo will run 2 x 2gb?

Also I have recently installed a radeon 5850 and the performance kicj from my old 8800gt is great, but am I right in thinking this board has a pcie 1.x rather than 2.x slot? If so is there anything I can do about this short of a full upgrade?

Many Thanks,


You're all really lovely people.

 

[spooky2th]

It looks like your board will only handle 4gigs of system memory. It's got 4 memory slots, so I would not put more than a 1gig stick in each slot. I could be wrong but that's what I got after just skimming thru your board specs at gigabyte's web site. And make sure the memory sticks are 1.8V or less.

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi there,

The specs on your MB show it will handle 4 GB or memory, either 2 2GB sticks or 4 1GB sticks. Also specs at 800/667 MHz. I would buy 4 matched 1GB sticks as Spooky mentioned which are listed on the RAM compatability list. Kingston does make 2 GB sticks but they are at 667 MHZ, and you want to choose the faster frequency for this older MB. Buy a matched set if you can.

This MB has 1 PCI-e x16 slot and other PCI-e x1 slots. If you use 2 video cards, it will at the slowest slot speed. So the best choice would be use the 5850 and if you want to use 2 monitors, connect them both to the 5850 card.

 

[spooky2th]

This memory will probably do nicely for your rig.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231136

And that PCI Express x16 slot, is about as good as you can get for a graphics card.