Memory timing with 4 modules

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Person

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Hello everybody! Long time no see (where else would I come back with a computer question!).
I ordered a GB of ram on NewEgg a few days ago. It was all fine and dandy, only 116 dolla-dolla bills (was $198 five months ago!), same as what I currently have for compatibility. Now, I had 2 512MB sticks in my computer already, running in dual channel. The new pair was excatly the same. Here comes my question (or rather unwelcome observation :)): now that I have 4 512MB sticks of RAM, the DDR speed reported by the BIOS and such, dropped to half!!! Is the memory still running at the normal speed somehow, but it just shows that because of 4 modules, or did it really drop to the heinous speeds of memory from 10 years ago? If it is the latter (God hope it is not!), is it worth keeping that additional GB but for the price of half the memory speed? Doesn't seem to me like a fair tradeoff AT ALL.
I would appreciate any comments!
 
What motherboard do you have?

You might only have 2 dual channel slots for the ram. So if you put a 3rd or 4th ram stick it, it will have to clock down the ram to the slower rate.
 
The mobo is MSI Neo2 NForce 3. It supports 2 dual channel ram pairs, at least according to the manual and specs I found.
 
The Winchester memory controller will underclock your memory to DDR333 speeds if all four DIMM slots are in use, there's no avoiding this, it was simply a bug with the memory controller.
 
DDR333 wouldn't be that bad (still horrible though), but my speed has dropped to 100mHz from 200mHz, HALF the damn speed! This is really screwed up...
 
You might only have 2 dual channel slots for the ram. So if you put a 3rd or 4th ram stick it, it will have to clock down the ram to the slower rate
Uhh there is no 'slower' rate when going from dual channel to single channel, it's still 200MHz no matter what.

Gaara pointed out basically whats happened, if you look at the MSI website it explains what happens when you try to use all 4 slots and it also depends on if your RAM modules are double ranked or not
 
yea, i tried using 4x 512 sticks, but it was pissing me off and beeping all over the place at me. I swapped em out for 2x 1 gig sticks and it works perfectly
 
Thanks for all the responses. For some reason I managed to run the memory at normal speeds, after clearing the CMOS and turning down the memory timing to T2... I also had to set the max memory clock option to 200 (this option is ignored anyway since when I overlock it goes up for some reason :), and it starts at that speed instead of just making it the max).
Wow.... an exciting day...
 
Well I wouldn't want T2 timing. For my ram that takes it from 98% Efficency down to 63%. Not good.

Possibly change the timings elsewhere. What are the ram's specs?
 
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