[Brainwasher]

Put this system together yesterday for a friend and got some odd bugs. Everything installed fine including windows. Core i7 960 proc, MSI Big Bang Board, 12Gb Patriot Sector 7 (3x4Gb@1600Mhz), OCZ Vertex 2 120GB SSD, 3 x Evga 570 Cards. Everything seemed well until I got to desktop. The mouse would jump around and apps/programs would run super slow.

Troubleshot it down to the ram. Would work with the 2 sticks Patriot in any slot config. As soon as I bumped up to 3 sticks, would have the issue in windows desktop (windows 7 pro x64), I had my friend (who's system this is) return the ram to Microcenter, who in turn talked him into getting 2 x 4Gb (2000MHz) sticks of Corsair equiv. I went home, he installed and said its working well. I thought with the x58 i7 board you had to run Tri-Channel. He is running 2 sticks with no issues.

My question is, how much if any performance am I losing by not running Tri-Channel? Again, I want to utilize this board to the max. Any input would be great, again I thought you had to run Tri-Channel Ram on x58 boards.

[BigTerminator]

Tri-Channel will give you in memory benchmarks and CPU benchmarks a decent boost but in real apps you won't feel a whole lot. Still you should still use tri-channel memory as you'll get an extra 4gb which will definitely help with performance. If you have the money do it.

[psionic98]

it might also be the channel on the board and not the ram stick itself. Should have tried memtest86+ on it before sending it back.

As bigterminator said though, there is a loss of bandwidth, but in the daily grind (not heavy multitasking) it shouldn't even be noticeable. Now in gaming, depending on game, you might run into some issues..

[Evilsizer]

i dont assume things so im going to ask... did you manually set ram speed/timings/voltages? did you chance any settings when you got everything installed and you got into bios/EFI? im looking for things beyond the HDD/sdd setup and disabling on-board devices you wont use.

[freeagent]

Originally Posted by psionic98

it might also be the channel on the board and not the ram stick itself. Should have tried memtest86+ on it before sending it back.

As bigterminator said though, there is a loss of bandwidth, but in the daily grind (not heavy multitasking) it shouldn't even be noticeable. Now in gaming, depending on game, you might run into some issues..

Im kind of glad this thread is here. The last couple of days my pc has been a total pos. Long story short, I use dimms 1,3,and 5, dimms 2 and 3 are dead, they died yesterday sometime. Anyways longer story short, I am running in dual channel mode right now, my bandwidth is still the same, and my latency decreased by 6-8ms

I will never buy another gigabyte board again, they were crap years ago, and they are still crap today I could sit here for hours telling you of the frustrations my board has givein me.. LIke how LLC never worked to begin with, or how I could almost never run my ram at its rated speed, or most of the spd presets.. wont run 2000mhz cas 9 but they will run 1600mhz cas7

I feel better thanks for listning

/informative rant