Nforce4 and 4 memory modules

danswan

danswan

danswan

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Evening all.

I seem to remember this question being bandied around when Nforce4 was all the rage but as I'm about a year behind the times I wondered if anyone could refresh my memory.

I have a DFI Infinity NF4 SLI board, Opteron 170 @2.85Ghz. I currently have 2 x 512 Corsair DDR1 modules in there and I have another 2 x 512 of similar but not identical memory. I am dual booting with XP and Vista and where 1GB seems fine in XP, in Vista it does not.

Am I right in thinking that 4 modules will definitely not work with this setup? Will save me fannying on swapping slots, clearing CMOS all night if it's a definite no lol.

Thanks

p.s is 'fannying' considered a swear word? If so let me know and I'll edit it ta.
 
4 sticks will work fine but you will have to run it at 2T, which is something like a 5% hit in performance.

It may also reduce your overclock ability. :)
 
Recently added 2 more sticks to my DFI Nforce4 Ultra-D, here's my experiences (Venice CPU):

Before
2 Sticks of Twinmos PC3200 cas2.5
~DDR460, 2-3-3-6, 1T

After
2 Sticks of Twinmos PC3200 cas2.5, 2 Sticks Corsair PC3200 Cas2
~DDR390, 2-3-3-6, 2T

Essentially I've had to drop the memory bus speed significantly and also drop to 2T in order to get it stable. In fact it wouldn't even boot unless I put the Corsair in the top slots rather than the bottom.

Overall performance loss I have estimated at around 6-9% based on some superpi and Quake3 benches, although I didn't do a scientific before-and-after comparison. Obviously in modern gaming at high resolution the impact will probably be much less.

I figured I would have to drop my FSB divider a little, but not down as far as that. Even with a mild overclock (DDR414) it's not stable at all. Tried sticking 3.2v through it but no joy.
 
Yeah thst sounds about right. But usually the benefit of having double the RAM can outweigh the smallish loss in performance :)
 
Thanks for the replies, I have got it going with similar results. After a day or so of tweaking I now have got it stable, cant get the CPU anything above 2.5GHZ though.

So from 2850 / 1GB @ 237 to 2500 / 2GB @ 208. Im guessing will be worth in in Vista, but not in XP.
 
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