DDR-400 3gb question

[sociable.nomad]

Hi all, Im not too up to speed on how DDR ram works so Im refering to the experts. I was asked by a workmate about his new memory configuration. he's running two 1gb sticks of Transcend DDR-400 in two slots and two 512 (Unknown different brand) DDR-400 in the other slots. will he be gaining anything from the two 512 sticks?

Thanks all again for your assistance - SN -

[RyderOCZ]

Will he gain anything? Yes, 1GB of ram ;) :D

He will lose a slight amount of performance when you look at a memory bandwidth benchmark (Sandra or Everest for example) due to the fact that his rank interleave will default to a lower setting due to the different density of the IC's used on the 512's and the 1024 sticks.
However, if he is using applications, etc that frequently need more than 2GB of ram, but less than 3GB, he will actually increase performance because he will have fewer pages to the swapfile/Hard drive.

Hope that helps.

[RWB]

Yeah more RAM...

[GrayFox]

More ram, less performance,And no highmem problems with xp . (XP can't address more then 3.5GB of ram)

[sociable.nomad]

So He'll get more Ram? right? :rolleyes: thanks guys for the insight:tongue:

Just wasnt sure if the missmatched sticks would cause a problem...