[Dazz3r]

My system: E6600 C2D 2.4Ghz, 8800GTS 320MB, Asus P5N32-SLI Premium, Windows Vista 64.

A friend recently gave me his old ram. 2 sticks of 1gb OCZ Gold DDR2 PC-6400 (800Mhz) with 5-5-5-15 timings. So I thought, ok what the heck, I'll go and buy another 2 gb. But they were out of stock. As I didnt want to go away empty handed I bought some corsair pc-6400 with 5-5-5-12 timings. The guy at the counter insisted as long as they have the same clock speed, it wouldn't affect performance.

When I put the 2 sticks of OCZ in I get a vista score of 5.4 for memory (calculations per second).

Likewise when I put the 2 sticks of Corsiar in I get a vista score of 5.4

When I put both in, it drops down to 1.4. It recognises that I have 4gb of ram but gives me that crappy score.

To be on the safe side, I ran 3dmark 06. Last year when I built my rig, I used to just get a score of 9000+. Yesterday, before I put the new ram in, I got 8500. Now,I get 7500 with the new ram, so it does seem to be having an effect on my system. I called the store to see if I could change it. They put me through to the repairs dept and I had a little chat with one of the engineers. He said the timings shouldn't matter and to ignore the vista score thing.

Can anyone here help?

Update: I have downloaded and installed the latest nforce chipset drivers and now vista gives me a 5.9 mem rating. However, running 3dmark 06 again and I got through the first 2 tests with quitye good fps (25 - 65 fps for first test and 27 - 45 on the second) but the cpu test runs my system to a halt. Seriously, its about 1 frame per minute. I exited the program.

Also, if I even so much as open a webpage and do any other minor task, my cpu monitor goes red sayinf both cores are at 100%. I am totally confused.

[chop_wood]

hey, when all 4 sticks are in, does the frequency or timings change? normally the memory settings are on auto and might adjust. try checking your actual ram frequency/timings with CPUZ (google it free) just to see if they are running at rated settings, and if not manually set the settings in bios. also, with 4 sticks as opposed to 2 , there is generally some slowdown but should not be that drastic benching wise. how does the system preform with 3 sticks out of curiosity? The cpu test in 3dmark should be more 1-3 frames per second, definitely not per minute. i would also check memory stability with memtest86 (free download u boot from cd) to check for errors. you may need a bit more voltage for all 4 sticks if there are stability problems found. lastly check your board for any bios updates.

[Dazz3r]

The memory timings according to CPU-Z on the memory tab are: 5-5-5-18. The SPD tab, for the different slots I get:

Slot 1&2: 2 columns one with a frequency at the top saying 270MHz and the second column headed by 400MHz, the timings for the 2 columns are 4-4-4-13 and 5-5-5-18 respectively. Do I only concern myself with the second column headed with 400Mhz?

Slot 3&4: This time there are 3 columns, the last one headed by the frequency of 400MHz. The timings underneath are 5-5-5-15

[pejsaboy]

What you'll want to do is manually set the speed and timings in your BIOS, if you haven't already. To start with, set it to the combined lowest SPD settings. In this case they would be 400mhz, 5.0-5-5-18-23 at 1.8 volts. I'd probably right down the numbers and which settings they correspond to since the numbers and the names are pretty similar in a lot of cases. Any other settings available you can leave on auto. That should get you running stable. If you plan on overclocking them I'd suggest doing each set on their own to find what the maximums are, and then testing [and fine-tuning] them together at the lower of the maximums.