3 gig or 2 on old barton A socket board?

[gixxer_25]

Hello everyone!

Just curious. I have a 3200+ barton on an Epox 8rda3+ board with 3 dimm slots. board can run a fsb of 400. I have 2x1 gig sticks of ddr400 pc3200 OCZ platinum EL and also a 1xgig stick of OCZ titanium pc3200 ddr400. Should i run all 3 gig on the board? im running 32bit xp pro as an os.

I heard rumors that there was some issue w/ xp not seeing the 3rd gig and the ram wouldnt run as fast as the 2x pair. All the ram is unbuffered. If I do run all 3.... is there a speceific order as to which ones are in the slots? 2 of the 3 slots are closer to eachother than the other 1.

Any help would be great!
Thanks!!!

Oh btw..i just picked up a thermalright slk-800 off of ebay and will be doing a slight OC on my rig. What's a good fan for that slk? noise isnt an issue as i have a thermaltake xaser II case and it's nice and quiet with ok cooling. i'll be modding the case with a 120mm fan in the top and maybe some higher CFM fans all around. seems it's difficult to just look at cpu fans without the actual heat sinks attached on newegg. Will case fans work in that department?

-Sean

 

[RollingThunder]

Hello everyone!

Just curious. I have a 3200+ barton on an Epox 8rda3+ board with 3 dimm slots. board can run a fsb of 400. I have 2x1 gig sticks of ddr400 pc3200 OCZ platinum EL and also a 1xgig stick of OCZ titanium pc3200 ddr400. Should i run all 3 gig on the board? im running 32bit xp pro as an os.

I heard rumors that there was some issue w/ xp not seeing the 3rd gig and the ram wouldnt run as fast as the 2x pair. All the ram is unbuffered. If I do run all 3.... is there a speceific order as to which ones are in the slots? 2 of the 3 slots are closer to eachother than the other 1.

Any help would be great!
Thanks!!!

Oh btw..i just picked up a thermalright slk-800 off of ebay and will be doing a slight OC on my rig. What's a good fan for that slk? noise isnt an issue as i have a thermaltake xaser II case and it's nice and quiet with ok cooling. i'll be modding the case with a 120mm fan in the top and maybe some higher CFM fans all around. seems it's difficult to just look at cpu fans without the actual heat sinks attached on newegg. Will case fans work in that department?

-Sean

Sean,

That board may not support dual channel memory since it only has three slots, I don't know, but I would use your matched pair of OCZ for XP Pro and get them running where you want. XP 32 bit doesn't recognize 4 Gb, three it should. Use the two slots closest together, they are usually the ones closest to your CPU. 2GB is more than enough for XP 32 bit.

 

[gixxer_25]

thunder-

yes the board supports Dual channel DDR, i was curious as if it would be better to run all 3 gigs of ram or not. also, is the 2 gig ok ro run games like age of conan, cod4, and crysis?

 

[Old Thrashbarg]

Well, first of all, the Nforce2 actually supported dual channel with 3 sticks of RAM. I dunno how well it worked, and I'm not sure if your particular board supported that feature, but it's possible. Dual channel really didn't make any difference on the AXP systems anyhow, so it's not really that big of a deal even if you have to run single-channel.

The other issue you might run into, is that it might not overclock very well with more than two sticks of RAM. Three sticks would be starting to put a strain on the memory controller.

The best I can say is: try it, see how it works. I don't expect there to be huge gains, as any software that would run well on an old AXP probably wouldn't need more than 2GB RAM, but you never know.

is the 2 gig ok ro run games like age of conan, cod4, and crysis?

LOL, it's not the 2GB RAM that's the issue there, it's your old CPU and (presumably equally old) video card. You might get those games to run, but don't expect them to be playable, regardless of how much memory you cram in that thing.

 

[benbaked]

Additionally, with my nforce2 boards I found that they overclocked slightly better in single channel compared to dual channel. Unless the motherboard has integrated video you won't see more then 5% improvement running dual channel.

 

[RollingThunder]

thunder-

yes the board supports Dual channel DDR, i was curious as if it would be better to run all 3 gigs of ram or not. also, is the 2 gig ok ro run games like age of conan, cod4, and crysis?

gixxer,

I'm not a gamer so I'll let the experts comment but CoD4 should work ok. I understand Crysis is a real bear so you'll have to try it.

 

[gixxer_25]

thanks guys for the assistance. I will be building an I7 system shortly and give this system to wifey-poo...hehehehe

 

[c627627]

What's a good fan for that slk?

I stayed on 2.4 GHz for years on nForce2 Epox 8RDA3+. Only when I got the (loud) Delta fan could I go to 2.5 GHz.

_____________________
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ AXMH 2500 FQQ4C
IQYHA 0348 SPMW
2 x 512MB Centon PC3200 (Samsung chips) @ 9 4 4 3
[200] FSB x 12.5 = 2500 MHz @ 1.87 Vcore with memory frequency at 100% [200 FSB] @ 2.90 Vdimm and 1.6 Vdd
nForce2 Epox 8RDA3+ v2.1, BIOS 07/29/2004
Thermalright SLK-900A with 80x38mm Delta EFB0812HHE fan
AIW 9600XT 128MB; Antec SX-835II case ; 500W OCZ StealthXStream OCZ500SXS
Five 80x25mm Case Fans

_____________________
Intel i7 920 [211] BCLK x 19 = 4.0 GHz @ [1.4000] CPU Voltage & [1.35000] QPI/DRAM Uncore Voltage, Batch 3836A394
3 x 1GB G.SKIL DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) [DDR3-1691MHz] 10-10-10-24 @ 1.64 DRAM Bus Voltage
ASUS P6T Deluxe v.1 [LGA 1366 Intel X58] BIOS 1102
Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme 1366 RT with 120mm Scythe S-Flex F fan
ASUS EAH4850 TOP Radeon HD 4850 512MB @ 680 MHz GPU & 2100 MHz Memory
Antec nine hundred case, two front 120mm fans, one back 120mm Fan, one top 200mm fan
Corsair CMPSU-750TX 750W

 

[Angry]

I barely played any of the newer games above 1024x768 with my old Socket A with any amount of decent fps with 3gb DDR400 and Geforce 6800. So I reverted back to old school games like Rogue Spear.

It did alright at 2.4ghz.