AMD Phenom II still limited to 2 slots only??

Ultima · October 27th, 2009, 10:26 AM

Hey guys,

when I bought the Phenom II X3, I heard about the fact that they had a small bug that would only be active when you use more then 1 ram slot per ram channel, as in occupy all 4 slots.

Is this still valid?? Has this been fixed with bios updates for mobo's?? I want to upgrade ram, but need to know if I can add another 4GB or need to buy 2 x 4GB new.

Thanks for any info.

Ultima

KarmaKiller · October 27th, 2009, 10:29 AM

I just looked this up yesterday for a friend. As far as I could tell, the limit is still there. I believe it is with 1066Mhz ram or over, until you jump to DDR3. I think it's a limitation with the CPU itself, and not so much the motherboards though, so I doubt a BIOS update would fix it.

Ultima · October 27th, 2009, 01:24 PM

I read some more as well.

Seems that the problem is only there if you use more then memory bank per channel and speed is at DDR 1333, if you use more 4 sticks in total, you can, but you'd have to set the speed to 1066 for stability.

I wonder how much that would change in performance.

masterdelta · October 28th, 2009, 12:41 AM

I'm wondering this too. I currently run 4GB DDR3 memory at 1600mhz 8-8-8-24 CR1 and plan to upgrade to 8GB soon. The RAM was designed for the 1600 speeds 8-8-8-24 CR1 and at these settings passes memtest 4.00+ at 1.9v, though I use 1.95v for close-to-total stability. My system is mostly stable though I do get an occasional crash that may or may not be caused by memory. If I need total stability, I loosen the timings.

I run this RAM with the AMD Phenom II x4 965, Gigabyte 790XT motherboard, a GTS 250 video card and a WD 1TB HDD.