Have I been wasting ram for almost 3 years?

[nick12345]

Hi,

I have this motherboard Asus M4A78T-E AMD 790GX

For the past 3 years I have had 3x2GBs of RAM installed. I noticed on the MB only two slots are orange and someone told me I can't run 3x2GB?

In system configuration it says I have 6GB of ram.

This is the ram I have

Crucial Ballistix 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10600C7 1333MHz

would I need to get 2x3GB instead?

thanks

 

[jsc]

You are running 6 GB of RAM. System configuration says so. You just aren't running dual channel, so you are sacrificing a little performance.

If you are going to run dual channel, you need either 2 X 2 GB, 4 X 2 GB, or 4 X 2GB. No one makes 3 GB DMM's.

 

[geofelt]

Not to worry. You have 6gb.
The purpose of color coding the slots is to identify the channels.
Unfortunately it is not a standard that tells you to install two sticks in like colored channels to get dual channel operation, or if each color identifies a channel, and you must install a stick in each.
The motherboard documentation should spell this clearly out.

On some motherboards, the entire 6gb will be single channel, and on others, 4gb will be dual channel, and the odd stick will be single channel.
Single channel has a minor impact on real app performance or fps. Synthetic benchmarks will show a larger difference.

You will have more performance, in general with 6gb of single channel ram than 4gb of dual channel.