little help making sure I understand things.....

[Geshtar]

So I am working on gathering components for my new comp and I had planned to get 2x 1GB sticks of ram for my new comp to start (probably something like the patriot 2-3-2-5 stuff) and a MSI Neo 4 Platinum motherboard. Doing additional research to make sure I didn't fall into any pitfalls, I have come across some things that really make no sense....

1) How can you tell if RAM is double-sided or not without physically having it? All the pictures of ram have heatspreaders on them now and I have not found the manufacturer website to be helpful (Patriot's atleast).

2) Related to 1), why are motherboard capabilities reduced by having RAM sticks that are double-sided? (but ultimately not that important since there is nothing I can do about it =( )

3) According to the marketing material for the MSI neo 4 platinum, it says it can support 4GB of ram, only in the user manual found here
on page 2-8 or so of the english manual, it says that it will only show/use 3GB of RAM if you put in 4 1GB sticks (which is the only way to get to 4GB cuz it doesn't support 2GB sticks). So to me it only really supporst 3GB......in which case, if other boards are similarly handicapped, the effective cap if you want to run dual channel and not waste RAM is really 2GB, in which case it almost seems like 4x512 makes more sense..........is this correct? I checked the ASUS A8N-E (equivalent to MSI board), and it also has the limitations mentioned previously.

Seems like flat out false advertising in my book......


Thanks in advance for any clarification/confirmation,

 

[(cf)Eclipse]

just get 2x1gb, then you don't have to deal with 1T/2T, and possibly downclocking your ram

to answer 1: almost all 512mb sticks are double sided. the only ones that i know of that aren't are the 512mb crucial value ram sticks that have .8T on the end of the model number. all 1gb sticks are definitly double sided

2. it's not the motherboard, but the limitation of the memory controller on the a64

 

[Geshtar]

Well according to that damn manual, I would still have to deal with downclocking my ram. The table says that if you have two sticks of double-sided ram and stick them both in the green slots for dual channel, it can only clock at DDR 333 speeds....... (-_-)

No winning I tell ya, gonna look at the ASUS boards more closely I think, they don't say anything about dropping speed for most double sided sticks, and they give a nice table of sticks that are cleared for DDR400 and dual channel. Just gotta hope some of the sticks there are low latency and not to expensive (nothing from Patriot is on their list sadly, those patriot sticks were the best deal I could find out there).

Any guesses to how bad would my chances of having to down clock my memory would be if I chose ram not on the approved list?

 

[(cf)Eclipse]

No winning I tell ya, gonna look at the ASUS boards more closely I think, they don't say anything about dropping speed for most double sided sticks

it's not usually the board that limits you, but the cpu's memory controller (gigabyte is the exception)

also, if that's the case, have a look at dfi boards, they definitly have the best quality ram setup.

and whatever ram is on the list.. doesn't matter. that really matters is the ram chips in the ram sticks, of which there are very few. just make sure you don't get generic ram and you'll be fine