DDR400 + DDR333 in DFI LP NF4?

**undefeatedone** · October 18th, 2012, 03:48 PM

Hello,

For those of you familiar with the DFI LP NF4 series of motherboards (AMD Socket 939):

I have 4 DIMM slots, two orange, and two yellow. I originally had a 512mb stick of DDR400 in one of the slots (I forgot which one). Now, I want to put a second 512mb stick in of DDR333.

My questions are:
1. will the computer be able to slow down the sticks so they're both running at DDR333 speeds so the slower stick won't cause errors?
2. What slots should I put the two sticks in?

Thanks guys!

**RicheemxX** · October 18th, 2012, 05:55 PM

You shouldn't have any issues, if anything you might need to manually set the speeds and timings but that isn't hard. You'll want to use slots of the same color. I'm not sure they'll run in true dual channel mode but either way keeping them on the same channel is usually the best bet.

**SoloCamo** · October 18th, 2012, 07:21 PM

Technically, it should auto downclock to the slower speed (ddr333 of course) and run in dual channel fine. Now if you populate all 4 slots, due to a limitation on the s939 platform, it will drop down to ddr333 either way and also go into single channel.

With two sticks though, you should be fine and any lost bandwidth will be more than made up for going single to dual channel on that setup.

**ShyguyXPC** · October 19th, 2012, 12:14 AM

which slots? Should be the 2 Orange slots, at least thats what it is on my board. Have a couple DDR 500 Corsair Sticks (2GB) in the 2 Orange slots on mine.

**Taxmancometh** · October 19th, 2012, 12:54 AM

I've heard on this forum that the difference between single channel and dual channel is negligible. So in other words your performance won't matter.

**ShyguyXPC** · October 19th, 2012, 01:24 AM

Dual channel got more and more irrelevant as time went on, with faster clocked and data throughput of DDR2 and DDR3, and larger capacity RAM, as time went by.

Dual Channel evolved from the Rambus blunder Intel had on its 1st Gen Pentium 4 platform. that was back when DDR first came out, and most of us were still running Single Channel SDRAM.

Rambus RDRAM required Dual channel in order to work, had to upgrade RAM in pairs and would not work with a single stick.

add to that, DDR's performance at lower clock speeds, heat, and a single stick was as good if not better than RDRAM, since RDRAM was 16-bit, and DDR was 64-bit.

RDRAM - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eventually DDR adopted Dual Channel, as a way to give users a small boost, theoretically it was supposed to be a large boost, double the performance, in practice, it never even got close.

Triple Channel, on Socket 1366 Intel Platforms, though a small bump in performance, was also negligible for most users.

And now socket 2011 Intel has Quad Channel.

**Taxmancometh** · October 19th, 2012, 01:52 AM

Good god man! You sure know your computers.

I can safely say I'm above average, but don't know all the advancements and I don't keep up with hardware. If I was I could offer people here on the forum computer build lists like you do. I'm into aviation big time though. Wanna talk about the differences in bleed air from a BC1900D v. a 737?

**ShyguyXPC** · October 19th, 2012, 03:50 AM

I just remember a lot of things, maybe not in exact details, but enough.

Any aviation stuff would probably be over my head.

When ever it comes to new things that I would like to know more, I'm afraid of losing info I already know... Like that Episode of Married With Children where Kelly gets on a Jeapordy like Sports Game show and retains all the Sports info, then someone says some new things and old info gets lost and replaced with useless info, so she ends up forgetting the answer to the last question, which ends up relating to Al, LOL.

**undefeatedone** · October 27th, 2012, 07:45 AM

Hey guys, thanks a lot for all the replies! Seems to be working now, although the chipset fan broke, so I taped one of those removable chipset cooling fans that came with my Asus P5B Deluxe over it.

**ShyguyXPC** · October 27th, 2012, 03:34 PM

Cool good to hear.

I forget what kind of securing mechanism the chipset heatsink has on it, my board is in a box on the other side of my room, and don't feel like getting up right now, but...

Ahh, I See: Newegg.com - DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 Ultra-D 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard

yeah, plastic push pins suck LOL.

but if you have some extra money on hand down the road, you could get something like these Enzotech low profile heatsinks, all copper with low pro fan on it, fits under the GPU's just fine.

though bit pricey, since they are solid copper.

Low Profile Chipset | Page 1 | Sort By: Product Title A-Z - FrozenCPU.com *

Enzotech Forged Copper Northbridge Low-Profile Heatsink (CNB-S1L) - FrozenCPU.com