Greetings,
I am new to this forum and happy to see other computer fanatics!
I have searched and looked through a few threads regarding my problem, but am still confused in solving it.
I have a ASRock P4V88 MB that supports dual channel. Max capacity (according to manufacturer) is 4GB.
By the way, my mb supports 800/533/400 mhz & my cpu is a P4 3.0E Ghz 800mhz HTT Prescott.
I am trying to figure out is it best to use:
- 3.5 GB PC3200 memory in single channel mode
- 3 GB PC3200 memory in dual channel mode or
- 4 GB PC2700 memory in dual channel mode (according to asrock, 3.5GB will only be recognized in this configuration, but I'm technically installing 4GB)
Any advice or direction to threads I missed would be greatly appreciated.
Don't mean to answer my own post here, but I had talked to couple of ppl and it seems if I go with the PC2700 configuration, because I have a 800MHz FSB CPU and 800MHz FSB MB, I will eventually burn up the PC2700. As far as the other 2 configurations I listed goes(3GB vs 3.5GB), when running 500MB more of RAM along side of already running something as high as 3GB of RAM, I guess I am not going to notice that much of a difference in performance(that is what I was told). Also I run video editing, graphic editing, etc. programs at once and it seems the dual channel configuration will work to my advantage.
My only problem right now is when I install 1GB DDR400 in slot 1, 512MB DDR400 in slot 2, 1GB DDR400 in slot 3, and 512MB DDR400 in slot 4, my BIOS shows the correct amount of RAM for each module & at dual channel mode, but each module is shown/recognized as DDR266 instead of DDR400. Not sure whats going on.
I will try to contact ASRock and see if this has anything to do with settings in my BIOS. Maybe there are some default settings I have to mess with inorder for it to recognize this is DDR400 and not DDR266.
If anyone else has this problem or related, any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.