A64 & Geil DDR500 need help please.

[Wikka]

Hello. I have bought an A64 3500, with 2*512 PC4000 dual channel ram and I have some quick questions if anyone can please help me so I can start putting it together.

1) Does running my Ram in dual channel mode 1/2 my available RAM. I mean have I still got 1 Gig total with my 2 chips running in dual channel or does going to dual channel with my two sticks halve the total ie 512 meg in dual channel? (sorry if this question seems dumb but both Dual Channel mem and Sata/Raid drives are new tech to me)

2) Why have Geil included thermal paste with my RAM chips? Is this for my CPU or am I supposed to spread it on my sticks

3) Have I wasted money going for DDR500 ram with a ASUS AV8 otherboard. My board only supports DDR400 but the saleman rambled on about me needing this ram with a 1000fsb or some such. I know he was FOS but i was thinking this would provide me more room to OC when i get more comfortable with my system and the tech in it. Can I just dial the memory bus up without effecting other things and hence get some use out of this RAM.

Thanks for any input. I havent been able to clarify these matters elsewhere. And cant assemble my system until I get some clarity.

Oh on a side note and prolly off topic. But can anyone tell me if connecting, in RAID, my two SATA drives is best done through the VIA RAID controller or the Promise RAID controller both seem the same to me although I am sure using one is better than the other.

Thanks heaps

 

[CVNet1]

1) Does running my Ram in dual channel mode 1/2 my available RAM. I mean have I still got 1 Gig total with my 2 chips running in dual channel or does going to dual channel with my two sticks halve the total ie 512 meg in dual channel? (sorry if this question seems dumb but both Dual Channel mem and Sata/Raid drives are new tech to me)

No

2) Why have Geil included thermal paste with my RAM chips? Is this for my CPU or am I supposed to spread it on my sticks

Don't spread it on your sticks. I have no idea why they put that in there, but its not going to be useful for anything ram related, and I wouldn't use it on my CPU, but then again I'm an ArticSilver 5 guy myself

3) Have I wasted money going for DDR500 ram with a ASUS AV8 otherboard. My board only supports DDR400 but the saleman rambled on about me needing this ram with a 1000fsb or some such. I know he was FOS but i was thinking this would provide me more room to OC when i get more comfortable with my system and the tech in it. Can I just dial the memory bus up without effecting other things and hence get some use out of this RAM.

No, well.... maybe. With the release of the Athlon64 processor, AMD moved the memory controller direclty onto the processor die. This means that your motherboard no longer is responsible for controlling the memory. It also means that with a future processor upgrade, you may be able to get an A64 processor that has a 1000Mhz FSB speed or you may be able to overclock yours to a 1000Mhz FSB. Honestly I don't know whether either options are possible because I don't personally own an S939 A64 system yet and thus have little personal experience with it. The Geil DDR500 will have some headroom no doubt for overclocking, but it will also run on looser timings. This isn't as big a deal now with the A64 as it was with the Athlon XP processors. Since the memory controller is directly on the processor die, latencies have already been reduced significantly, so running ram with higher/looser timings isn't going to impact performance as much as it once did. Still, don't expect to be able to run these DDR500 sticks at 2,2,2,10 1T as they are probable going to be 3,3,3,10 1T sticks.

Oh on a side note and prolly off topic. But can anyone tell me if connecting, in RAID, my two SATA drives is best done through the VIA RAID controller or the Promise RAID controller both seem the same to me although I am sure using one is better than the other.

Generally speaking, the Promise Raid controller is regarded as a better performer when discussing 3rd party raid solutions. However, the VIA Raid controller is embedded in the South Bridge, so it is possible that this chipset could see performance gains over the promise controller simply because it is not a 3rd party chip but embedded into the Via South Bridge. I haven't seen any comparison out there with regard to this situation, but perhaps you could find some on google. If you don't see any, then you could just test the performance yourself by installing a OS on each one and running RAID benchmarking tools to compare them to each other. Make sure you examine processor overhead when you are testing them as well as read/write speed.

Hope that helps you

 

[Wikka]

Thanks man great help to me.