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IC7-G and the difference between 1 and 2 sticks of ram!

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pvanosta

Member
Joined
Mar 20, 2001
I have noticed a BIG difference in stability between 1 and two sticks of ram.
As you can see in my sig (Ignore the CPU speed, that's the point of this thread), I use 2 512MB sticks of Kingston KHX-3500.
With 1 stick, my system was stable at 283 fsb (3.40 GHz).
But my memory scores were just OK, because I was getting the benefit of the dual channel DDR.
As soon as I put the second stick in, I could not even run prime95 at 265 fsb, with relaxed ram timings ('By Speed').
3DMark03 also crashes halfway through (which I could run at 283 FSB with 1 stick of ram).
I'm currently using VCore 1.70 (tried 1.675, 1.65, etc), and VRAM is 2.8V (tried 2.7 and 2.6).
There's something F*cked up in the way the system uses this dual ddr capability. (I hope a new BIOS is coming soon). I'm using 1.1 at the moment.
Yes, I get nice memory bandwidth in the 5700's in Sandra, but I lose my overclock in the process. I have not yet found how low I have to go to run Prime95 and 3DMark03 in a stable fashion.
Anyone else seen this?
 
Negative.
I was running 1 stick at 283 fsb with 5:4 stable

With 2 sticks, I still get random bluescreens and reboots at 265 fsb with 5:4
 
pvanosta said:
I have noticed a BIG difference in stability between 1 and two sticks of ram...

With 1 stick, my system was stable at 283 fsb (3.40 GHz)...

But my memory scores were just OK, because I was getting the benefit of the dual channel DDR.

With my first IC7 using my 2.4C, I could only o/c to 275 FSB using two sticks of RAM, but with one stick I could also get 183 FSB with the better of the two sticks (the other one was only good for 277 FSB).

You are NOT getting the benefit of dual channel with only one stick. You need either 2 or 4 sticks to run dual channel DDR. One stick = single channel.
 
Batboy:
Yes, that was a typo.
It should read:

My memory scores were just OK with one stick at 283 fsb, because I was NOT getting the benefit of dual channel...

:D


Still, with two sticks i still get random reboots at 265 fsb...it's almost worth just selling that second stick and going back to single channel ddr...
 
Except look at the memory benchmarks of the single channel vs. the dual channel. That makes up for the lesser CPU clock speed.

Yeah, I know... we all prefer to brag about max speed... it's more manly than memory bandwidth.

Do you get 183 FSB in single channel mode with either stick? Maybe you have one that's better than the other like me. I'm getting another two sticks of the same exact RAM and going to try to pick out the two best ones.

Dual channel is harder to overclock, there is no doubt of that... and it's harder to run tight RAM timings too.
 
Further testing:

Both sticks, if used individually, will run 100% stable at
280 fsb / 224 MEM (5:4) with 2-7-3-3 latencies
This is running prime95 and full runs of 3Dmark03.

When running two sticks, I can barely run at 270/216 (NOT stable)

Prime95 dies after 10 minutes
3Dmark03 dies at the first CPU test, which is strange, I think...

Something about using two sticks (the process of enabling the dual channel DDR), is adding extra strain to the system.

I'm going to try a bigger Northbridge cooler in a few days.

Not sure what else to try...
 
After reading Ed's article, I changed the mem settings to 2.5-7-3-3
Now I can run at 266/213 stable (3dmark03 / prime95).

I still don't get anywhere near his mem bandwidth scores though.
I'm hitting around 5450, not 5850...
 
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