RAM Help

[Indigo]

The reason you *don't* want to fill all of the slots in a system is generally because it is harder on the memory controller. You can't overclock as high, and you'll have a harder time with strict timings. It also makes it harder to upgrade in the future because then you have more RAM sticks that you have to toss out - whether or not you re-use them in another system, I'd rather have extra 2GB's than a ton of extra 1GB's and so on. Also on some boards you'll lose some speed, which is the case with mine, but it doesn't bother me much. If you are aware of the potential losses however, it's not a big deal - fill all of the slots to your heart's content. Just be aware of the downfalls. In my case, using all 4 slots with 2GB modules means I have 8GB installed, but instead of the modules running at DDR2-1066, they run at DDR2-800. AMD chips have shown to not really care about the drop from 1066 to 800, the performance margin is something in the single percent range. I find that it's plenty fast, and I have tons of extra headroom. Not having to worry about RAM is nice - and running without a pagefile speeds things up tremendously.