ram bank interleaving?

I've seen other posts but nothing to make this clear to me. I'm using one stick of Samsung PC2700 512 memory in my system, is it even worth setting to 4 bank with one chip? Everyone one else seems to use this setting. Can you take a performance hit or mess with stability if you enable it while it's not necessary? I haven't noticed either way. Any enlightment appreciated.

Welcome to Overclockers.com!

Enabling interleav will help memory performance quite a bit. It is possible for your system to become unstable if you enable it but that will only happen if you are running the ram at a very high FSB. If you want to see how much of a difference it makes try the ram benchmark in Sisoft Sandra 2002.

Thanks

I've seen everyone using Sandra but haven't gotten it myself yet, is it reliable? Heard conflicting stories. I've just started benching with PCMark2002 and haven't seen much difference in the mem scores, I've benched the same setup twice and have had varying scores each time so it is hard to tell any improvements.


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Antech case/ 350W psu/dual fans
92mm front case fan
50mm back
Asus A7V333
Athlon 1.4C - OC'ed to 1557(9x173fsb)
Alpha PAL8045 w/Sunon 50cfm fan
Samsung PC2700 512MB (2,2,2,5) 1T Auto, 4 bank
Thermaltake ram heatplates w/fan
Radeon VE 32MB DDR
Soundblaster Audigy Platinum
Linksys 10/100 Ethernet
2 40G WD Caviars
TDK 24/10/32 CD-RW
Toshiba 6/32 DVD-ROM

If you read some of the sticky notes here in the Memory threads you'll can get a better idea of what interleave is and how it works.

Most all of the memory/mobo's now-a-days handle 4-bank interleave if your RAM is over 64MB. Since most people, and especially OC'er's are running 256+, there is no problem running 4-bank.

Enabling this BIOS setting essentially allows the BIOS to write/read to up to 4 pages in memory at once thereby speeding up the entire system. Prior to interleave writing, the system would have to write/read one page at a time.

Thus, 2 bank writes/reads to 2 pages, and 4 to 4 pages.

Wedo

tuskenraider

welcome to the forums