mistake that I would like to pass on to other people so that they don't make the same mistake.I apologize in advance to tech heads that may already know about this. I thought I was a bit of a tech head until I assumed something I shouldn't have…..
I am currently running a gig of ram (2 X 512mb) on my asus board and decided this past weekend that I was going to add another 512 since I was getting "up there" with all these sample heavy vsti's. I thought that this wasn't going to be a problem at all since my board could handle 2 gigs of ram and I still had an extra DIMM slot.
Well, I got home, installed the extra ram, booted up and……hmmm…….still reading at 1024mb of ram. "oh….stupid me, I didn't sit the ram in there tight enough"…..opened it back up, tried sitting it down in there tighter, but it was still showing the same amount of ram. Crap.
So then I decided to break out my motherboard manual because, at this point, I am second guessing myself about how much ram it can handle.
2 gigs of ram. Yep, I was right, so what's the problem???
It turns out that even though I have 3 DIMM slots…my board can only handle 4 banks. Well, both of my previous sticks of ram are double sided (like 99% of most people) and these two sticks are using all "4 banks" and I have to leave that last bank empty….OR….replace two of my sticks with single sided memory.
So it has to run like this:
SS + SS + SS
DS + SS + SS
Or
DS + DS * Empty
So I am basically screwed
unless I replace the ram I currently have with either a higher mb stick of double ram or replace them with single sided ram.Anyway…..sorry to blah blah blah……but I wanted to vent a little and also pass on a little advice for anybody thinking about adding RAM before reading their motherboard manual.
I've never made the mistake myself, but knew about the restriction.