DDR 333 and DDR 400

[Vipex23]

I have 4 sticks of Corsair 512mb XMS-XL yet it runs at DDR333. Yet my friend has 2 sticks of the same ram and it runs at 400. Why is that? Is his 2 sticks of memory as effective as my 4 sticks?

[iddqd]

Go into bios and set the divider to 1:1 (or 400/200(highest)MHz) manually.

Edit: wait... i just noticed that you have 4 sticks. Yeah, it seems 166MHz is the highest your board will get you to.

[Bullitt]

Most boards will barf with more than 4 banks of double-sided memory @ 200mhz. You've got 8 banks (each 512 stick is double-sided). Hope for a bios revision....

[Sephiro444]

Is it an nForce4 board? I don't know if it applies to other boards, but apparently when an nForce4 board that normally runs default at DDR400 has 4 sticks of memory in, it default clocks down to DDR333.

That's my situation with my A8N-SLI, 4 sticks of Corsair XMS3200XL. You can (and I have) "overclock" it back to DDR400, and it should run just fine. I've noticed with lengthy runs of Memtest I get 1 error in Test #5, infrequently and it has never caused problems in actual use. The same error is gone when using the default DDR333.

It's your call, but unless I see some kind of stability issues manifest outside Memtest, I'll stick with DDR400.