RAM for Vista - Double-sided with NForce3 Ultra?

ray_gillespie

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Right, I'm giving my PC a small boost to get it up to scratch for Vista, I've just bought a new Seagate SATA HD, but I want to give my system an extra 1GB of RAM to bring it up to 2GB in total.

Now I remember a while ago reading some nasty rumour that Nforce3 Ultra motherboards will only accept 4 sticks of RAM if it's not double-sided. Is this true? At present I have 2 512MB sticks of single-sided RAM running in dual channel. Will I need to make sure that the next 2 sticks are single-sided also, and if so where can I buy them from that will guarantee them to be single-sided? The last time I had to do this I think I had to order over the phone from Crucial actually.

Reps for any help given :)

PS Also, why does my sig not show up properly in IE7?
 
no nforce 3 take all 4 banks with double sided, you just have to increase the command rate to 2T from 1T else it'll crash on boot up :)
 
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Will I still have to increase the command rate if it's all single sided? What about if 2 are single and 2 are double?

Also, will there be a performance hit from doing this?
 
Arse then! Do I just increase the command rate in the BIOS? Also, what kind of a hit can I expect? Shall I just stick with 1GB and buy a Creative X-fi card instead? :p
 
yeah increase it in the bios. It's not much of a hit though.
 
So what do you reckon? Will I see much benefit from running T2 with 2GB compared to T1 with 1GB under Vista? If not I might just get an X-fi as I currently use on-board sound which isn't great and I might get a small performance increase, though that's debatable.

EDIT: I just bought an OEM Xtreme Music card for £60 from dabs... :)
 
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Well, I just slotted in the new X-fi card...

It's awesome. I never thought I'd hear so much difference, my speakers aren't even anything special just bog standard 2.1. I'm well impressed with this :)
 
There would have to be something wrong with your hearing if you didn't notice an improvement over any other sound solution for pc's :)
 
I've just had a look at my settings and I'm running at T2 any way! On the downside, it's really unstable when I try T1, even with just 2 sticks of RAM. Will it still be ok with 4 sticks at T2?
 
yeah it'll be fine at 2T with 4 sticks. I ran it at 2T with 4 sticks until I upgraded to a core 2 duo :)
 
Cool. Any idea why it should be unstable at T1 with just 2 sticks? Could it be that RAS-CAS shi-t?
 
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Delay may be too short for your ram.[/FONT]​

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Go to The Definitive BIOS Optimization Guide then scroll down to Memory Subsystem. The guide can also help you out with any other bios setting you want to know what they are for and possibly change.[/FONT]​
 

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