(formerly)tangentmind.org

More on my Chaintech 7njl6

Ok, so I loaded up the program cpu-z, which I only learned about recently, so I could get some information about the memory in my computer. Lo and behold it tells me my memory is in channels 2 and 3. Apparently, my motherboard is lying about which channels are which. They look like this || |. The motherboard labels the channels as 1,2, and then 3. I had the memory in what I thought was 1 and 2. So I switched the one in motherboard labeled 1 to motherboard labeled 3.

Lo and behold I boot up the computer and the BIOS boot up screen tells me that my memory is running in dual channel. Apparently they are something like 2,3, and then 1, and once again, they look like this || | and the motherboard says "ddr1, ddr2, ddr3". Also, at first the computer crashed when windows was starting, but I simply reset the bios to failsafe, and then to optimal, set my agp aperture to 64(for HD playback), and set it to "reset" in the menu for pci or something(I don't remember which menu it's under exactly. After that everying started up alright.

Now, apparently I never learned anything about dual channel or I forgot. My motherboard's chipset uses Nvidia nforce2, which supports dual channel and I have two memory modules of equal size, and the same brand but made by different manufacturers. Apparently, in general you need the memory in slots 1 and 3 for dual channel, but it varies by motherboard. The info is easily available using a google search. I may have tried putting my memory in dual channel, before, but as I can tell you now, my memory slots are not in order.

I do not know if this will affect my motherboard stability, but it would be awesome if it did because that would save me the $60-100 expense of replacing it.

However, I have found a new reason to upgrade from Athlon XP. Some of the new games, and possibly other software coming out right now require sse2, which athlon xp does not support. So far I have ran into Lost Planet, and Dirt, which need it.

If my computer stays stable I will post the good news here. I may still need to set the memory to the same frequency as the CPU fsb. I haven't done that yet. Hopefully Dual Channel should speed up a few things though.