Much Ado About Everything

So, an Asrock Dual-Sata2 motherboard doesn’t actually work with 4 sticks of RAM! Or rather, it only works if those sticks are all identical. I found it the hard way. Well, that’s what you get for trying to save money. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, “the lesson is: never try!”. Indeed, I already spent money twice trying to save it, only to have both attemps fail (though it was my fault the first time).

Basically, I have 2 sticks of 512MB OCZ VX Gold, and I wanted to add two more 512MB sticks to get total of 2G of memory. What I wanted to do is replace 512MB sticks with two 1G sticks, which would let me keep all my memory timings tight. But I wanted to save money and decided to live with 2T – it only causes 3% or so of performance loss in real-life applications, they say. So I got two G.Skill 512MB sticks. Unfortunately, the board would not boot at all, not even to bios splash screen. After a few failed boots, it would automatically load bios defaults and then it would boot all the way to Windows where it would continue working. Unfortunately, with memory running at 100MHz! I lost half of my memory bandwidth, dropping from 4499/4470 to 2239/2241!! The loss is even bigger if you consider that at 1T I would get 5426/5366 (these are all Sisoft Sandra memory bandwidth benchmarks). This happens if you turn on the “memory flexibility” option in bios, which is the default, and without which it won’t even boot.

After trying just about everything – changing all available memory settings in bios, raising DRAM voltage, shuffling sticks, forcing timing change with A64 tweaker (in case it was bios, not hardware holding it back) – I had to admit defeat. But my friend is running the same board with those same G.Skill sticks – 4 of them – and his machine seems to work fine! So do some other people in some forums I visited. I’ll have to investigate more, just to confirm that this is what it is (meaning, I’m not the only one). Even if it’s just my board that’s bad, it won’t help me much as the warranty is probably long expired by now.