4 GB of DDR3 1600 or 6GB of DDR3 1333?

madtownidiot said:

Night Hawk said:

If you decide to run the Crucial memory you will need to perform a full clean install in order to see that activated due to the new 7 hardware profiling. I thought you would want to be aware of while deciding. I went through that when swapping OCZ memory out for the Mushkin now in use. Otherwise need to call into MS to preserve the present install.

Are you serious? I doubled the memory on my system and moved an image to an ssd raid 0 array with no need to reactivate or reinstall windows

You doubled what memory? aww... the exact same brand and type. Here OCZ was swapped out for Mushkin being the only one found with the 1.5-1.7v voltage range best suited for the board here seeing a different manufacturer of memory take place.

When moving an image you still booted into Windows to see drivers loaded for.... the exact same hardwares with the exception of being on a different drive while nothing on the board itself was changed. That's what the new hardware profiling takes a snapshot of during activation.

Hi blackrose,

I too would opt for 1600 over 1333. However, to respond to something posted earlier (your concern about losing dual channel with 6GB's), I'll comment. I hope I'm not too late?

Your board supports asynchronous dual channel. So even with the odd configuration of 2x2GB's + 2x1GB's, you are/were running in dual channel. It's what many Dell's use these days. Of course, it's not quite as good as synchronous dual channel (4GB's or 8GB's with an 1156), but it's still not single channel.

Also, as others have said, unless you're using more than 4GB's with your CAD software, then 4GB's is plenty. Going to 8GB's, you may end up having to loosen the timings of the new 1600MHz RAM, which would not be a good thing.

I think you might enjoy this article, which speaks to this thread: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mem...0-lga1156.html

Fumz said:

Your board supports asynchronous dual channel. So even with the odd configuration of 2x2GB's + 2x1GB's, you are/were running in dual channel.

I had a quick look through that mobo manual and it didn't mention anything about it - so I wasn't quite sure. My bad, I was in 775 socket mode

Yeah, I've had a hell of a time finding documentation from motherboard makers, who, for the most part, don't really say anything at all about it. I started looking into this reading stuff from guys with 1156 Dells with 6GB's... wondering about such an odd configuration.

Perhaps the reason is that it's a feature of the chipset, and since there are so many chipsets that support it, they just don't bother.

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/cs-011965.htm

List of chipsets is at the bottom of the page.

Trust me, the i5 has no problem at all supporting ddr1600 Mine is flying along just fine; besides, support for specific speed RAM is a function of the motherboard, not the cpu.

Glad you enjoyed the read. I did too.

With the present memory or the kit you won you would still end up buying a second kit to see 8gb either way since one the present let go on you. As for the dual channel mode the manual will show which pair of dimm slots have to be populated typically chanel 1 a and #2 a depending on the layout.

Supposedly will four slots filled here with 1.5 1600 memory it will oc out to 1800? Yet the memory clock is already at the highest setting? While typically running stock I've yet to how that is available.