2 sticks or 4 sticks of dual ddr2?

[PashaM]

My mobo is Asus P5K Premium and it has 4 ram slots, 2 yellow and 2 black, in them i have 2 Crucial sticks or 1 gig each in yellow slots, those are sort of primary slots for dual ddr. My question is, if i want to bump my ram up to 4gig, can i just add 2 more sticks of 1 gig each into those black slots, or will it screw up my "dual" thing? My guess is that idealy would be to replace those 2 1gig modules with 2 2gig modules, but now that i have those 2 already can i just add 2 more?

See PIC:

 

[adrianx]

well... this is the "old story"

all depend from the memory controler...

for sure you can easy make an OC with 2 module, with 4 module the minimum latence will be grow more that with 2 module.

also the power support for the memory will count.

with 4 dims will have more heat, more power consumation.

I say that will be better with 2x2GB that 4x1GB

 

[Laurijan]

yes like adrianx said 4 modules (4gigs) will make tweaking the timings a little bit more complicated..

 

[PashaM]

i dont plan on doing any tweaking, the idea behind "dual" ram is to have 2 sticks of identical ram, not 4. So im asking will the performance suffer a great deal or not? And why 2 slots are yellow and 2 are black?

 

[Laurijan]

The benefit is more than than it has downsides - go for it! Yellow is (dual) channel 1 and black is (dual) channel 2 (or otherwise)

 

[Tatty_Two]

4 x 1GB sticks is fine to run in dual channel mode but like people have said, for compatibility, stability and overclocking (if you overclock) 2 x 2GB generally is the best, many boards have issues with overclocking in 4 banks but generally if you are not overclocking then it should be OK.

I have 4 x 1GB (you cant get Ballistix PC8500 in 4GB kits) in mine and had terrible problems with stability initially but I overclock the CPU and therefore overclock the memory but then Gigabyte released a new BIOS for my motherboard and that solved the issue.

 

[Deleted member 3]

i dont plan on doing any tweaking, the idea behind "dual" ram is to have 2 sticks of identical ram, not 4. So im asking will the performance suffer a great deal or not? And why 2 slots are yellow and 2 are black?

There is no such thing as "dual RAM", it's dual channel. In other words the idea is to have two identical channels. A channel could hold multiple DIMMs depending on memory type. (non-reg is limited to 2 DIMMs per channel, more for registered. FB can do 8 DIMMs per channel for instance)

The slot colors are to identify channels.

 

[ntdouglas]

4 x 1GB sticks is fine to run in dual channel mode but like people have said, for compatibility, stability and overclocking (if you overclock) 2 x 2GB generally is the best, many boards have issues with overclocking in 4 banks but generally if you are not overclocking then it should be OK.

I have 4 x 1GB (you cant get Ballistix PC8500 in 4GB kits) in mine and had terrible problems with stability initially but I overclock the CPU and therefore overclock the memory but then Gigabyte released a new BIOS for my motherboard and that solved the issue.

I agree with tatty. Many guys are having problems just running stock speeds when all four dimms are populated.

 

[trog100]

i run overclocked with 4 one gig sticks.. but even just running a pair of 2 gig sticks is likely to be not as tweakable as two 1 gig sticks..

buy two more 1 gig sticks and try and get the same brand and type.. u shouldnt have any problems..

new mobos have bios problems when first released.. memory incompatibility is the most common one.. the first new bios release usually imroves things..

trog