Is a three slot motherboard unstable??

I have been thinking of buying a motherboard, but people have told me that uneven number of RAM slots are unstable....
How truthful is this???
Any help would be appreciated

I have a Gigabyte RZ series board (P4 2.8 @ 3.12) with a 1.5GB of DDR400 and have had no stability issues at all.

This is going to become my small file server once I get my new stuff on Monday.

fohijgmz said:

I have been thinking of buying a motherboard, but people have told me that uneven number of RAM slots are unstable....
How truthful is this???
Any help would be appreciated

Click to expand...

The center slot of all my 754-mobos has been terribly unstable. But that's no problem as long as you don't use it.

the only pc's i have ever had have 3 slots... it makes no sense to say "3 slots means less stability" if that was the case, why would they make 3 ram slots?

Some people just have MB issues and have some of the slots not work/not work properly, which is an issue with some 4slots as well....

I've never had any problem with 3 ram slotted motherboards. It's more fo who the designer and manufacturer of the board is thatn anything else. My Asus k8n rocks where as my friends Asus 3 slot board is horrible.

Now keep in mind though that some companies DO pose limitations on the slots. Such as you have to run ddr 400 in certain slots and such and if all are used it MAY lower the clock speed. This is not all boards, just some.

It is not recommended to populate every memory slot of a socket 754-board. The memory controller only supports 6 differential clock pairs, while 9 are required in order to run three sticks at maximum speed. The use of three modules will require an external clock buffer. In terms of clock forwarding, using 3 sticks in socket 754 board is like using 6 sticks in a 939 board.

_damien_ said:

It is not recommended to populate every memory slot of a socket 754-board.

Click to expand...

According to the manual of my mobo I can only support 2GB of ram. I guess that having three ram slots and just being able two support too isn't a great idea