Question on RAM

[talwynor]

I received some great feedback the lats time I asked an upgrade question, so I thought I'd try again. I have an ASUS A7n8x deluxe motherboard with 3 memory slots. I currently use 2 512 sticks of PC3200 RAM in dual channel mode.

Question: Will I see a performance boost by adding a a third stcik (bringing the total to 1.5 gigs)? Will I lose the dual channel functionality? Would it matter?

 

[drothgery]

Beyond 1GB of RAM is unlikely to make a difference (obDisclaimer: I'm not a hardcore gamer, but the only reason going from 512MB to 1GB was noticeable at the office was because I tend to keep multiple instances of Visual Studio open at the same time) unless you're working in some very memory-intensive applications (video editing, high-end image editing, database serving, etc.)

Still... a bit of quick googling shows that's an nForce 2 (Athlon XP) motherboard. Dual channel vs. single channel doesn't really make much difference with an Athlon XP; memory bandwidth doesn't have anywhere near the effect on AMD boxes as it does on Intel boxes.

 

[IronWolf]

Depending on what you are doing I would think it unlikely that going to a Gig and half of RAM will make a big difference. Of course you may be a user who either has a ton of memory eating apps open at the same time or playing some really high end games. Then maybe you would see some difference. Is your system paging much currently?

 

[Rackhir]

If you check the motherboard manual it should be able to answer the single/dual channel question. If you've lost it I'm sure you can download a copy from ASUS's web site. Obviously the third slot wouldn't be gaining any dual channel benefits in any case. From what I understand, the Athlon processors benefit greatly from low latency memory, that's the CAS rating, a CAS of 2-2-2-? would be a very low latency memory, 3-3-3-8 I think is typical.