Turnning PC3200 into PC2700 Ultra Fast

Ok I have 2 sticks of PC3200 DDR ram running dual channel at 200MHz in a ASUS A7N8X Deluxe ver2.0 Motherboard.

The system was very fast and totally working and creating awesome online game scores.

Just for kicks I tried something last Thursday mucking about I was bored.

I have some PC2700 512MB sticks waiting to go into my little server box I am building, both sticks used to be in my Wife's AMD 2800+ computer and they have proven to be flawless. Anyhow I took 1 512MB stick and popped it into my third and final hardware RAM slot on the A7N8X motherboard.

What this will do automatically is pull the two PC3200 512MB stick down to a PC2700 MB speeds.

What was unexpected is I could keep the same RAM timings for all three RAM chips @ 7,2,2,2.5 OR I could use the Overclock settings in the main boards BIOS and set the CPU and RAM to aggressive settings.

I ran benchmarks using Aida32 on the Dual Channel PC3200 running @ 7,2,2,2.5 Prior to installing the PC2700 RAM stick and got good ram speed tests.

Using all three sticks of RAM at PC2700 speeds actually scored higher then the two original PC3200 @ 1Gig of system ram.

So apparently in Windows XP/Pro I have pro....Simply making sure there is MORE MEMORY even at a lower speed means better performance.

Now this used to be true for Win 98 up to 512MB as that is all Win98 can see and with XP it very true that you need and they recommend 512MB or more of system RAM but what was astonishing was that simply going from 1 Gig to 1 and a half Gig of Ram even at slower speeds provided faster Benchmarks.

Now I am going to remove the PC2700 stick and install a PC3200 512MB stick and see if I can really score some fast Benchmarks on memory timing.

I feel the extra RAM is not the only reason for the performance leap even if the original 1 Gig of PC3200 was pulled down to PC2700 speeds. It is more likely that the Hardware resources of the motherboard thoroughly enjoyed having all three hardware RAM slots filled and the onboard chip-sets were able to open up and perform more quickly.

So in conclusion if you have 3 or 4 Hardware slots for memory install all of them with Memory. There seems to be a real performance gain hidden away here even if not really apparent on first look.

Most guys run dual channel 2 sticks of ram and forget about the open third or fourth slots. In this case the board only has 3 slots.

It will report on post however that slots 2,3 and 4,5 are installed if you have only 1,2 or 2,3 installed with memory this is because of the DDR memory dual-channel function.

Install all three slots and it reports all 4 slots are fully installed with DDR memory timings enabled.

Hmmm..... What in hell was ASUS doing and can ABIT do this or is it just a quirk on the ASUS board ?

The fact that it seems to improve overall system performance by 25% is very interesting.

In this instance the PC3200 was forced to function at the slower PC2700 RAM speeds. Downside at first appeared to be a performance LOSS that in fact returned a performance Increase!! The other upside was even though the PC3200 chips had heat spreaders on them and the chunk of PC 2700 did not all the memory recorded as much as 10 deg cooler.

So guys if you have achieved the PC3200 level in your computer and think that having 2 sticks running in DUAL Channel with DDR timing is the outer threshold of memory speed and you simply removed your old PC2700 and stored it away in a foil bag in your desk drawer get a stick of the PC2700 back out or 2 if you have 4 slots and re-install it next to your PC3200 ram then watch your system actually increase in performance.

Barton 3200+ 400MHz
A7N8X Deluxe
Air Cooled 45C
2x512 Corsair DDR 400 PC3200
GeForce FX5900
Two Maxtor 40Gig 8MB cach 7200rpm
SONY RW 52x/24x/52x
SONY DVD 16x/40x