Memory upgrade, a little problem to work out.

[NoobSauce]

Hello every one, I'm new here, i was referred by my A+ instructor to try out the site for general information and such. Any way, I'm upgrading my memory by one gig of memory and for some reason my system is not recognizing the new stick upgrade. I have a Gigabye GA-K8U-939 board and 3 sticks of 1G each OCZ PC-3200 D400 memory. Right now I have 2 sticks 1G each in there and was trying to put the 3rd in and ran into problems. I noticed that 2 of my 4 DIMMS where purple and the other 2 where orange. I looked at the manual and got this configuration diagram that didn't make to much since to me. What I'm wondering is can I even just add a single stick to it or do I have to have 4 sticks to make it work? Thanks in advance to any replies.

[mjc]

You should be able to add a single stick...but it would 'break' dual channel mode. Dual channel is a performance enhancement.

What happens when you substitute the 3rd stick for one of the ones already installed?

[NoobSauce]

I replaced one of the old sticks with the new one and it show 2g of ram, so i guess the new stick is working. I haven't found any thing to show me what I have to do or how to configure my BIOS to set it up. I'm going to investigate my BIOS setting to see what it says.

[mjc]

Yeah, there may be something there

[NoobSauce]

Well, it looks like there are no setting other than setting voltage to the DIMMS. I guess I could try some trial and error to see what works, not really sure what else to do at these point.

[NoobSauce]

Well that didn't work ether, any ideas?

[mjc]

Looking at the manual...and the memory chart...it seems that this board does not support three sticks of memory, at all.

[NoobSauce]

Thats what I was afraid of, it looked like that to me but I was hoping not. Looks like I ether have to buy another stick or a new board. Thanks for the effort MJC, I was a pcguide forum virgin but no more lol.

[mjc]

If you are running anything other than 64 bit Vista on it, just don't worry about maxing it out...XP can live quite nicely on 2GB...

[NoobSauce]

Mmm, very interesting development, I had a stick of 512k laying around so I decided to put it in to see what would happen and it boots up and says I have 2.5g ram, the other 1g stick is still not showing up. I have no clue to what to think, my board is in it's own world.

[mjc]

<me>scratches head...

OK, so with three 1 GB sticks...it doesn't work right, but all three sticks or a pair of them work fine. Add a 512 MB stick to the pair and it works...

It seems that board will automatically default to dual channel, if certain conditions are met...I'm wondering, if since the three 1 GB are matched, if it isn't trying to make them 'dual' channel. The 512 MB mixed with the 1 GB sticks should break 'dual channel' mode because of the size differential.