if u put more ram in your comp could it slow your computer down?

[icksol]

say for example you put alot of ram in your computer, and its not identical to the other sticks but it is the same type for the motherboard is there any possibility of it affecting your performance?

[XJnine]

I haven't seen this problem in more recent computers but way back in the day if you put more RAM than was cacheable by the chipset your system performance would go down. It would basically cause your system to operate with its cache disabled.

As far as a current system goes, you would probably only see a performance hit if there's a problem with your memory. There are also some motherboard specific problems that arise at times. What are the specs of the system in question?

[BigD]

yes it can affect performance in a AMD system... if you have more than two sticks in it can affect the speed, because it will automaticly set it for 2t and ddr333 instead of 1t and ddr400 (if thats what your using), also good luck getting it stable in a AMD system

not sure about Intel tho

[Das Capitolin]

say for example you put alot of ram in your computer, and its not identical to the other sticks but it is the same type for the motherboard is there any possibility of it affecting your performance?

If you have three DDR-400 modules, and you add a single DDR-266 module, then yes it will decrease performance because now all of them have to work at 266.

[Kougar]

If you have three DDR-400 modules, and you add a single DDR-266 module, then yes it will decrease performance because now all of them have to work at 266.

Das Capitolin said it first. The same thing goes for timings, once a user uses 4 sticks of RAM usually the memory controller has to use looser timings. If one of the modules has slower timings than the rest then all of them will have to run at the slowest timings as well, even at the slowest DDR speed as well.

[Bio-Hazard]

yes it can affect performance in a AMD system... if you have more than two sticks in it can affect the speed, because it will automaticly set it for 2t and ddr333 instead of 1t and ddr400 (if thats what your using), also good luck getting it stable in a AMD system

not sure about Intel tho
It's not all that hard to get stable really, I put 4 sticks of DDR 400 2-2-2-5 ram in my sons system and OC'd the CPU to 250x9 with the ram set at DDR400 2-2-2-5 2T, that was one of my folding rigs until my son came and picked it up. Where's there's a will, there's a way.........:mrgreen:

[DragonMaster]

Well, it doesn't run 2T in all configurations with 4 sticks IIRC. The motherboard manual will state that there's a difference between single-sided, double-sided, etc. for the RAM combinations. I think that 4 single-sided sticks run at DDR333, but 4 doule-sided DDR400 (On a DDR system) You'll have to look at the motherboard's manual.

What to note is that if you add sticks with lower timings, the rest will follow down.

[Bio-Hazard]

I think that you'll find that most AMD based systems will have to be run at 2t with 4 sticks of ram regardless if they are double or single sided.
And I do think that you have it turned around in regards of speed, most systems will run a DDR400 with single sided ram and DDR333 with double sided.
If setup correctly and properly tuned with the best timings, you can get some performance gains.
My sons system runs most benchmarks pretty close (his is a bit slower) to what I'm getting in regards to memory performance and he's got 4 x 512 and I'm running 2 x 1 gig.
Take your time and set it up correctly and you'll be fine.

[DragonMaster]

Heh, I just looked at my mobo's manual, if you have 4 single sided, you get DDR400, if you have 4 double-sided, DDR333, but if you decide to put RAM in the 2nd channel A&B slots double-sided will give DDR400, while single-sided will give DDR333.

[BigD]

It's not all that hard to get stable really, I put 4 sticks of DDR 400 2-2-2-5 ram in my sons system and OC'd the CPU to 250x9 with the ram set at DDR400 2-2-2-5 2T, that was one of my folding rigs until my son came and picked it up. Where's there's a will, there's a way.........:mrgreen:
yeah, but in general a lot of people have a hard time getting it stable:(

[Xero (1)ne]

it also depends on windows and how it handles the memory, it can only handle barely 2 gigs and 4 in the 64bit version
ummmm...i would say you get better performance in the sense that you dont have to write as much to the disk, but with 4 sticks you get 333 but thats wuht oc'ing is for right?:wink:

AMD's also get higher memory b/w because of the on-die memory controller lets it go through the HT instead of through the northbridge:-D