3x4GB on a H67 MB

[Umfriend]

Hi,

I got a new PC now with a i5-2500 on a H67 board. Given the dual-mem architecture I am wondering whether one should expect a performance hit if one populated a single third memory slot. Would the OS use the dual-channel 8gb first or does it not now prioritisation at all (like the Amiga had ChipMem and FastMem for instance)?

Umf

[Jammrock]

You'll need to look at your mobo manual to be sure a third is supported at. At the very least you'll lose dual channel.

[Evildead666]

Dual channel Mobos usually work best with two slots occupied.
With four you get some speed problems, and usually have to drop some perf.

With three, you will probably lose dual channel, so i'd only populate two slots.

[Jammrock]

With four you get some speed problems, and usually have to drop some perf.

That depends greatly on what generation your platform is and the density of the RAM. Older platforms had this problem, and some server configs do, but on the desktop level you generally do not have this issue.

Unless you put in high density RAM, like 8GB modules. The more chips on the DRAM module the lower your memory timings have to be.

But there's shouldn't be a performance difference between running two or four slots of, say, 2GB high speed DIMMs.

[Evildead666]

You have to drop the latencies a bit, and you do lose some speed.
It depends if you need all the memory or not, mostly not nowadays.
4Gb is pretty plenty, 8 Gb is huge.