Intel Pentium upgrade + Memory upgrade problem

[Adventure Man]

Hi guys, question, I wanted to increase my Ram to 4 GB on my mobo. I currently have 2 GB of pc3200, in DIMM 1 and 3 (so that I can enable hyperthreading). My mobo is a D865PERL from intel, and I have a p4 3.4 ghz, 1mb cache 2. My question lies in that if I was to add two more pieces of ram in the 2 and 4 dimm slots would I run into problems? I would like to add two more 1 gb pc3200 pieces there. I have read this little piece on another forum and it made me worried :

"What happens when you have all 4 DIMMS populated with RAM? In many cases, your memory clock will drop to the second highest clock speed (provided the memory was able to run at the highest supported clock speed natively). Just look at any older motherboard manual for evidence of this."

Is my overall ram speed gonna change to pc2700???

Ok second quickie question. Say I was to go a little cheaper and get two 512mb pieces of ram instead of the two 1gb pieces i was talking about, for a total of 3 gb's running all at pc3200....would this happen? And more importantly, would I be able to use the hyperthreading feature on my p4 processor? I just couldn't find info from intel about this.

Thanks ahead of time guys for takin the time out to help me.
a.m.

P.S.: some more info on my mobo and current memory...

North Bridge: Intel Springdale i865PE
South Bridge: Intel 82801EB ICH5
G.Skill memory.
550 watt ps, Rosewill
AGP 8X 7800gs nvidia vid card
Raptor Hard Drive 36gigabytes
My mobo needed a pci ethernet card, came with no ethernet, but still this is the model.
Creative extreme music sound card
Hauppauge tv card
a few fans
what else lol??

[saphalline]

The i865PE chipset does not have this problem. You are free to install all 4 sticks of RAM, even the max size, without issues. The only limitations will be with WinXP, which does not natively support the use of 4GB of RAM. Your RAM will be limited to ~3.54GB by the BIOS and only 3GB in Windows. The rest of the RAM is used for memory/IRQ allocations and the WinXP kernel.

[rond36]

Adventure Man, I think you are getting hyper-threading, and duel-channel memory confused.

Your memory configuration does not effect hyper-threading, hyper-threading will be enabled even if you have just 1 DIMM installed in any slot. The only configuration change that would disable HT is if you install a processor that does not support HT such as a Pentium 4 "A" series 400MHz FSB, or P4 "B" series 533MHz FSB (except the P4 "B" 3.06GHz which does support HT)

If I were you I would go with the 3GB option because Win XP 32bit does not support the full 4GB and you can't install Win XP X64bit because your processor does not support EM64T and there aren't any socket 478 processors that do.

Slot 1-----------------1GB
Slot 2-----------------512MB
Slot 3-----------------1GB
Slot 4-----------------512MB

[saphalline]

Good catch, rond36. I meant to address that confusion, but I forgot. :p

[Adventure Man]

thanks for the help guys, i really appreciate the great responses, i think I'm gonna do what rond said. I'll tell you fellas how it turns out. a.m.