For a heads up in case you didnt know about how the Z7S runs with only 2 sticks of memory, It runs much slower then it should provided you give each Channel (Per CPU) a stick if you only have 2 to use. There are two independent buses for the memory. One per CPU. Many people have had terrible results with this board speed wise because they stuck just two sticks on the one bus leaving a CPU starving and thus nearly cutting the boards overall speed by half in all the benchmarks / tests they threw at it blaming ASUS rather then the way they set it up. 6 sticks on this board also kills speed as each bus is also dual channel
Yep, the 5400 chipset supports quad-channel memory bus, so the best is to use 4x sticks, equal sizing would make for lowest latencies.
Adding additional ram to the 2x black slots will increase latencies, but also give higher bandwidth - so depending on your application, you either populate them or not.
In my case, for gaming/benching, 4x will yield the best performance.
he picked up the Apple versions...
The point is I asked the question before bidding if they will work on the motherboard, and the answer came back conclusive - I would not have purchased if I knew they had the wide heatspreaders
I have emailed Kingston on possibly selling me the 4x heatspreaders only, let's wait and see what they say.
The Seller already indicated he can take them back, but I may just as well swop the heatspreaders.
Will keep you posted.