3 slots 2x512 1x1gig is this ok?

[pak]

I have an asus k8n board and I currently have 2x512 kingston sticks in my setup. I want to go to 2 gigs. Is it ok for me to just throw a 1 gig stick in there with the 2 512s?

--pak

[patrck17]

I'd say so.

[stang8118]

I don't know about that perticular mobo, but usually when you fill all 3 ram slots it drops it from ddr 400 to ddr 333.... just an FYI

You can do it no problem, and its socket 754 so you don't get duel channel anyways :p

Would read your mobo manual.

[Falkentyne]

Should be no problem, but you will have to run at the timings of the weakest stick, of course and you might need a small ddrv increase, if you were previously just stable at a certain voltage.

You will also lose dual channel, PAT/performance mode as well, as the sticks are different.

[pak]

thx for the info.... just for reference here is the ram I am using.
http://www.centralcomputers.com/itemdetail.asp?item=MEMKVR40002R

I decided to take a look at my manual and I found a chart. Looks like running 3 dimms will reduce me to 333, which I do not want. So I think im going to hold off on this.

But I noticed the chart has all this double side, single side stuff. I do not know what it means. I am going to assume that double side is better. Whats the difference between ds and ss? What is my ram?

--pak

[stang8118]

single sided means the chips are all on the same side of the ram stick, double sided means that the ram sticks have chips on both sides.

Usually only 256mb sticks have single sided, but sometimes you can find them on 512mb sticks, and never will you find them on a 1gb chip.

BTW you never had duel channel to begin with, so you won't lose it :p

[ju5tin99]

Would the extra RAM even make much of a difference? From what I hear there aren't many programs out there that would even come close to needing 2 gigs of RAM unless you're into pretty heavy calculations, video editing, or you're really pushing to get over 150 fps in the latest game. I would just stick with the 1 gig. For most common apps 1 gig is plenty.

[pak]

ok, here comes noobness.....

duel channel? Have no idea what you are talking about...please share....

--pak

[stang8118]

Dual channel memory doubles the pipelines available to the memory controller. This allows more information to be recalled from the memory faster.

A64 socket 939 and 940 support this, the XP series of amd support this, and pretty much every intel supports this. Only modern cpu that doesn't is socket 754 AMD :(

[ju5tin99]

Being a pretty close to a fellow noob myself, here's my simple understanding of dual channel. You need to have two identical sticks of RAM, and a MB/CPU combo capable of running in dual channel mode.

Let's say as an example you have two identical 512mb chips, running in dual channel. At any particular instant your comp may need to use 256mb of RAM for whatever process it's performing. Rather than going and pulling all 256mb from one chip, through one pipleline, and only overflowing to the second chip when the memory needed exceeds 512mb, the comp would instead pull 128mb from each stick of RAM, using two pipelines, thereby effectively doubling the speed at which RAM can be accessed. From what I understand this leads to quite an increase in performance.

Like I said I'm still kind of a noob, so I may need to be corrected, but from what I've read this is how it works.