Memory Stabilization for Four Sticks!! Help!

[EL_BaRTO]

Hello, as some may noticed I just recently built my gaming rig system. It is awesome, and I did pretty well on my first overclocking project also. Anyways, back to the topic:

Well, I had 1.5GB of ram, Kingston HyperX, on an older rig, which had an XP 3200+ Barton. Upon upgrading my computer rig, for overclocking and serious gaming, to an AMD 64 3200+ (Winchester) and ASUS A8V Deluxe mobo, I couldn't use THREE sticks of my hyper X. With that said I am CURRENTLY using only 1GB of RAM. (My lonely third memory stick is in my closet lol ).

I am planning to buy a fourth stick of memory. Please correct me upon what I found out and heard: I heard that AMD 64 can handle 4 sticks of memory better than an XP. With that said, I also heard that AMD 64 STILL has a performance hit with 4 stick modules in place. IS there ANY way I could stabilize my system at maximum performance with four sticks of memory?? If so, may I ask how? I really don't want to risk buying another Hyper X memory stick and find out it's useless due to a performance hit.

Some suggest that performance hit won't be affected if you use TWO 1GB sticks of memory of HyperX compared to FOUR 512MB sticks of memory. Is this really true? Please understand that I posted a similiar question for my XP computer, and I am hoping that the same situation won't happen to my current AMD64 computer. Thanks to all who reply and I appreciate any suggestions. Thanks again.

[alex666]

As I understand it, the winchesters could not handle four and maybe even three sticks of double-sided ram, or something like that. Your best best is to go to one of the on-line forums specific to your motherboard and check with the folks there, many likely will have similar experiences. I know that the newest venice and san diego cores specifically fixed the problem with four double-sided dimms. As for using two 1 gig sticks, I don't really know. Again, forums specific to your mobo would help. You might want to try the following and pick your specific amd mobo manufacturer:

http://forums.pcper.com/forumdisplay.php?f=21

[saphalline]

Until the Venice core revision came along, K8-based CPU's on the consumer end had many problems related to max RAM. The main issue was that AMD was forced to make some drastic changes to the onboard memory controller in a hurry - they needed to provide support for unbuffered RAM, and they needed to get the darn things out the door! Compounding that fact, certain BIOSes actually have max RAM limitations as well, which is completely separate from what the CPU can handle. So there are actually some Socket 754/939 mobo's out there that can't handle more than 2GB of RAM. Go fig.

In relation to the onboard memory controller of the Hammer series (and the spin-offs like Winchester and Palermo), they have extreme difficulty with various RAM configurations that aren't buffered when it comes to the number of internal banks of the RAM chips. While this is not directly related to the single/double-sided issue of RAM modules, it is nevertheless affected since more RAM modules have more banks in the RAM chips. Venice not only fixed this limitation (with regard to unbuffered RAM), but it also added support for hybrid dual-channel configurations (much like the NForce2's memory controller).

Opteron's require the use of buffered RAM and so do not inherently have a RAM limitation on them. But the new San Diego core revision theoretically adds the ability to run hybrid dual-channel configurations, with the only caveat being the requirement to match up the RAM configurations in systems with more than one Opteron. It will be interesting to see if that will work!