I'm looking for some advice, basically I have an A8N-SLI motherboard running 2 x 512Mb PC3200 400Mhz Kingmax ram sticks to take advantage of the dual channel thingo. I'm wanting to up my total ram to 2Gb my question is, should I get another 2 x 512 Mb sticks? or can I just add 1 x 1Gb stick? Also should I try and get the same brand ram, or doesn't it matter?

I've alreayd posted this on OCDU and the only real response I got was "just get rid of the 2 x 512 and get 2 x 1Gb", which is not gonna happen, I didn't buy them just to have to throw them out and pay double what I need to to bring my system up to 2Gb. I want to be able to afford another 200Gb SATA HDD as well.

just get rid of the 2 x 512 and get 2 x 1Gb

should I get another 2 x 512 Mb sticks

yes.

using 4 sticks of ram at once has lots of problems. go with the 2x1gb

define "problems"

heh, I did the same thing a while back. Running 4 sticks of the same corsair ram (512M). It's all working perfectly and has been for some time. My mate bought the same RAM so between us we had 4 sets of matched sticks. It took us about a week (or maybe 2) of swapping around the sets to get memtest86 to run for a couple of days without getting an error. Completely random and frustrating to boot! In the end we got both our machines working fine. I think he has all the old RAM and I have the new stuff.

As far as I know you would need to get 2 more 512s for stuff to work. But as mentioned above... success may vary.

edit: might I add, we run aggressive timings (2-2-2-5), so that may have made things excessively difficult for us.

last edited by Whiplash at 15:07:58 18/Jul/06

yeah those are basically the problems you might run into, on my pc ive got 2 x 512 and 2 x 256, both sets are different brands and i dont have problems .. probably because theyre lower density memory though

yea i run 4 sticks of 512 of 2 different brands
had some initial dramas but mucked around and cleared them up and all is good now

I have the same mobo with a 4800+ dualcore and running two XFX 7800gtx's on it with 2GB xmspro (corsair matched pair) ram, has never given me a ounce of trouble runs awesomely.

When I was sourcing bits and pieces I did get a few responses indicating that running sli card setups the ram timings can be crucial and a few poeple on the US sli zone had probs with multiple sticks, I'll try to dig up a link from the SLI zone site that actually recommends going the matched pair route...but having said that i notice a few gaming sites that do hardware reviews and such have their test rigs with multiple sticks of ram so its 6 of one , half a dozen of the other really. I guess as long as its really good quality ram your using you should be ok, might take you a bit of swapping arround ect....but as I said when you are running two vid cards the ram timing can be a big factor

yeah well I plan to buy the exact same type of ram (2x 512Mb Kingmax 400Mhz PC3200 DDR) though obviously a different batch, I'm running an X800, no SLI active (or will there be) I'm not messing with the ram timing in any way or overclocking anything nor will I ever.

yea i run 4 sticks of 512 of 2 different brands
had some initial dramas but mucked around and cleared them up and all is good now

what did you have to do to get it running?

I have the 2x1gig GeiL Dual Channel and it works perfectly on the Premium version of the board.

i have 2 x 512 of generic crap running on the same board and i have no problem, can't see why 4 would make a difference

4 makes a huge difference.. firstly, you will only be running at 2T command rate instead of 1T = massive performance loss. Secondly, depending on the ram brand and the speed/timings you wish to run it, you may find it difficult to get 4 sticks working..

as previously mentioned, 2*1gig

When running 4 sticks of DDR400 memory in the standard A8N-SLI board it clocks the ram speed back to DDR333, not really ideal...

I have tried this with 4 x 512m and 2 x 512m + 2 x 1g's and its the same with both. It does this with 4 x 1g sticks as well... people with too much money and not enough sense did this all the time when the a8n-sli boards were all the rage. Not only does Windows not utilise a good chunk of it, it runs slower!



If you want 2gig of ram you'd be better off selling the 512's and buying 2 x 1g sticks.

last edited by rubba-chikin at 20:46:52 18/Jul/06

so, anyone wanna buy some memory?

yeh and I forgot to mention mine is the later premium version as well.

I am honestly not sure about the deluxe and premium, I am certain of the standard board though cause I own one myself :)

yeh and I forgot to mention mine is the later premium version as well.

I noticed that Asus finally bought out a new bios to fix the performance issues with 7-series NVidias running on the A8N-Premium dude... did this help ya, or were your cards not in the red-zone here?

Ooooh yeah, forgot about not being able to run 1T command rate. That happened to me (board = asus a8v). I really needed the extra gig though and didn't want to fork out for 2x1gb sticks, so took the smallish performance hit.

Pretty sure my RAM is still running at DDR400 though. I seem to remember checking that.

Is the performance increase by going up to 2Gb of 4x 512 (minus the small performance decrease by using 4) still better than just 1Gb?

That would depend entirely on your memory usage. If you are running stuff that puts you over 1gb then yes, getting 4x512s would be better than just staying 1gb. Swapfile thrashing sucks arse (disk IO is teh slow).

I got mine back when FEAR came out, I monitored my memory usage while playing and found it was going over the 1gb mark. And we all know how bad and inconvenient swapping in games can be. Once I installed the extra gig it was much more fluid to play.

However, this was for a A8V motherboard, not sure what the story would be for A8N. I can assure you however that swapping to disk is worst case, not something you want to be happening often. So if the A8N takes you down to DDR333 when using 4 sticks, and on 1gb you were experiencing a hell of a lot of swapping, I would say that you would get a smoother experience with 2gb at DDR333...

Of course, the best solution would be to get 2x1gb. But you already know that.

I noticed that Asus finally bought out a new bios to fix the performance issues with 7-series NVidias running on the A8N-Premium dude... did this help ya, or were your cards not in the red-zone here?

I'll check it out but the machine has performed right on the money as as afar as being comparable in all bench test with other test rigs on reliable sites ect...thanks.

I've only really found the disk thrashing to be an issue now that I've got BF2 after closing BF2 it'd take a while for my desktop to be usable, before that I didn't have too much of a problem

Hmmm, yeah, it probably had a little bit to do with the fact that I was running x64 at the time (wrt my FEAR thrashing). x64 chewed up more memory (understandably though). But i'd say there would be plenty of games around atm that would cause similar symptoms to the ones you explained.

Heh, I remember when I had 256MB of RAM and diablo2 would cause desktop thrashing after quitting :)

But it sounds like you are in the clear while playing bf2 which is something at least (as in, bf2 and essential windows stuff fits into 1gb). Must be pretty annoying having the desktop thrashing afterwards though. Also, don't forget that it has to write that stuff to the swapfile too... That would happen in-game at first.