"Timothy Drouillard" wrote in message
...

The shop made sure all four pieces of ram were from the same lot, and they
installed the ram and the cpu right there so they could fire up the MB to
insure it all worked. The ram is generic DDR400 ram, but it works just
fine.


I don't know if my present two are from the same lot, but probably are.
Buying two more will insure the second pair will not, more than likely, two
months after the initial purchase. It may not matter as long as each pair
is matched.


Of course he was mistaken. As long as you use mathed (same size) pairs of
ram, either one pair, two pairs or three pairs, it will run in
dual-channel
mode.


....and are placed in the right slots (1&4, 2&5, and 3&6).


The only time I had a problem was when I started experimenting with
settings
in the BIOS (F5). I saw where you could check 'max performance' or
something
like that and tried it.

All I got was a black screen and a constant beeping. Removed the Cmos
battery for a few min, fired it back up and chose the default settings,
and
it's been running great ever since.


The "top performance" option sets RAM timing (maybe other things) to much
more aggressive settings. I tried setting from the default (SPL) of 3-3-3-8
to 2.5-3-3-7 and it seemed to run okay, but RAM performance was only 3%
improved, so I set it back to the default. I need stability over
performance here and would rather not take any chances for such a small
performance increase, which probably would not be even noticed.