Dual Channel Or No??

I just bought an extra 2gb of ram for pc so along with the other stick i have 3gb of ram, there all the same speed (pc2-5300) alough one stick came with the mobo and the two new ones are crucial ballistics, what i wanna know is can i run the two crucial or even all 3 in dual channel mode, if that's possible? I have checked CPU-Z to see and there all running in single channel.

At the moment the 2 ballistics are in slot 1 & 2 and the other one is in slot 3, is this wrong for dual channel or will i have to take out one of the sticks or something like that? (don't really want to do.)


Thanks

you cant have three sticks running in DUAL channel mode....hence the dual bit....you can only run it with two or four sticks.
The slots that can run in dual channel mode can usually be identified as they are in different colours. So say you had two green slots and two red slots then you would put the RAM into either the green or red to run dual.
if your OCing then i suggest you take the one out and leave the ballistix in.

Sam is right, you will need 2 or 4 sticks to run dual channel

Is dual channel that much faster? I have two matched stick in my rig at home, and two unmatched for a total of 3.5 GB, would it be better to live with 2?

We had a thread going about this a while back and it has changed.
First, Intel has a three channel mobo with 6 sticks. Interesting concept.

Running DC on a Phenom has been proven to boost performance quite a bit as seen in the AMD/AC's Phenom thread.

As far as I know, it's a 10% boost with PC3200. Don't know about faster chips.

BTW, my mobo has colour coding, but if only two chips are used, it activates Dual Channel regardless of the colours.

I'm not sure if I remember this right (last board I used 3 sticks in was an old PIII board) but some motherboards will run dual channel, and single channel in some kind of mixed mode. I don't know that any current boards will do this though.

I'm pretty sure it's only 2/4 sticks for dual channel =/

All modern chipsets from Intel can run dual channel with 3 sticks, as long as the amount of ram is equal in both channels. 1+1+1 won't give dual channel, but 1+512+512 will.

Other chipsets can do the same.

The brand new chipsets from Intel can even split the memory into to zones (Intel call it flex-mode), so you can run dual channel over some of the ram, and single over the rest. 1+1+1 would run dual channel over first 2 GB and single over the last.

Edit: Intel also has the asymmetric dual channel mode, which is entered if the amount is not equal. But memory addresses are stacked, so normal programs won't benefit from this mode.

So it looks like you need to post your motherboard so you can get a more precise response "AP-Ashley".