Curious about Ram on an NF7-2

[Juan Sanchez]

I have been looking at ram for my NF7-S, I am definently getting PC3200 Kingston HyperX. My question is should I get 2 sticks of 256mb and run it dual channel or get 1 stick of 512mb and of course deal with it running single channel. My justifying of the 1 stick of 512 is two-fold, a) its cheaper getting the 1x 512 stick ($123) as compared to getting 2x 256 sticks ($127), and b) I would like to have 1 GB of ram so I can play Half-Life 2 as smoothly as possible without any hic-ups(all the systems I've seen testing HL2 had 1GB of RAM). I have also heard that the single channel nForce boards have been known to beat the dual channel in a few benchmarks, would this hold true if I run the NF7-S as a Single channel board? When/if I do get dual channel ram what dimm sockets should I put them in. I heard that they are supposed to go it reverse order so: Dimm3=Stick RAM in; GIANT GAP; Dimm2=Stick RAM in; Dimm1=Leave Empty. Well as always, any assistance will be appreciated guys, peace out...

[rpertusio]

If you were to use dual channel, you can put the RAM in slots 1 & 3, OR 2 & 3. When your computer boots, it should indicate that it is using Dual Channel.

According to this article from Extreme Overclocking, some of the benchmarks do show some significant increases in performance when dual channel was enabled. Whether the increases are significant enough for you is a different story

- rp

[Strawbs]

I'm going to assume your board has 3 slots!

I have 2x256 + 1x512 in my Asus A7N8X-D and it still runs and shows as dual channel, as long as the ram is of the same speed and equal to the combined size of the 2 smaller sticks yours should work too.

The difference in speed between single (7xxMb\s) & dual (12xxMb\s) mode is around 60%+ here, which is not to be sniffed at.

[Juan Sanchez]

My Q is, should I get 2x256 sticks and be stuck w/ "only" 512 MB of ram, or should I get 1x512 stick with the option of going up to a 1024MB of RAM in the future

[Strawbs]

rpertusio's link says you have three sockets, therefore; you can get 2x256 pc2700 and add another 512 pc2700 later and it would still run in dual channel mode. If you use pc3200 or pc3500 then you would be stuck with 2 sticks. Only you can decide how long it would be before you could afford to upgrade.

[Juan Sanchez]

Nice, thank strawbs and sorry Rperusio, for not cliking on the link

[rpertusio]

Originally posted by Strawbs
you can get 2x256 and add another 512 later and it shoud still run in dual channel mode.

are you sure about that? I don't have time to look right now, but doesn't dual channel work with ONLY 2 slots filled? (In other words, a 3rd would take it out of dual channel mode) I could be wrong. I will research later tonight and find out for sure.

- rp

[Strawbs]

mine works with 3 sticks as I said earlier in this thread!