I screwed up on the Ram. >.<

[Sheky]

CPU: Athlon 3400 socket 754.

I stupidly bought a stick of 1GB Crucial PC3200 ram without looking at my motherboard manual. Turns out my board, Asus K8V-X has a problem running at the DDR 400 setting when all three slots are used and if one of them has double sided ram. My two old sticks are 512MB Generic Samsung PC3200. When I add the new 1GB Crucial stick to it, the bus speed turns into 160mhz when it's suppose to be 200.

http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/130/41416499kz1.th.jpg (http://img338.imageshack.us/my.php?image=41416499kz1.jpg)

I tried going into the bios setting to force it to run at 200mhz but then I'd crash when I try to game. Is there some way to remedy this or am I basically stuck running at 166mhz?

I've noticed in the manual that the motherboard can run at DDR400 speed if double sided ram is paired with a single sided one. So are there single sided 1GB sticks for PC3200?

If there's no way to fix this, is it better to keep 2GB of ram running at PC2700 speeds or keep 1.5GB running at PC32000 speed? Thanks for your time.

My CPUZ info are as follows:

DIMM #1

General
Memory type DDR
Manufacturer (ID) Crucial Technology (7F7F7F7F7F9BFFFF)
Size 1024 MBytes
Max bandwidth PC3200 (200 MHz)
Part number
Serial number 56DE4D9C
Manufacturing date Week 02/Year 03

Attributes
Number of banks 2
Data width 64 bits
Correction None
Registered no
Buffered no
EPP no

Timings table
Frequency (MHz) 166 200
CAS# 2.5 3.0
RAS# to CAS# delay 3 3
RAS# Precharge 3 3
TRAS 7 8



DIMM #2

General
Memory type DDR
Manufacturer (ID) (0000000000000000)
Size 512 MBytes
Max bandwidth PC3200 (200 MHz)
Part number

Attributes
Number of banks 1
Data width 64 bits
Correction None
Registered no
Buffered no
EPP no

Timings table
Frequency (MHz) 200
CAS# 3.0
RAS# to CAS# delay 4
RAS# Precharge 4
TRAS 8



DIMM #3

General
Memory type DDR
Manufacturer (ID) (0000000000000000)
Size 512 MBytes
Max bandwidth PC3200 (200 MHz)
Part number

Attributes
Number of banks 1
Data width 64 bits
Correction None
Registered no
Buffered no
EPP no

Timings table
Frequency (MHz) 200
CAS# 3.0
RAS# to CAS# delay 4
RAS# Precharge 4
TRAS 8

[Amourek]

No way around it that I know of. It's a limitation of the chipset implementation. You suffer a small penalty when going from 200Mhz to 160Mhz memory, nothing significant. 1.5GB may be plenty though depending on how many applications you run and how memory intensive they are.

[Sheky]

It's basically only for games and Photoshop. Guess I could try 1.5GB and see...though BF2 and L2 seems to eat a lot of ram.

[evanx]

You might want to try memtest just in case the new ram is faulty.

[importpsycho]

there is nothing wrong with it
that's just how it is
I would use 2gb at 166
or you can try to find someone to trade 1x1gb stick for your 2x512mb sticks

[goofball]

with photoshop, 2GB is better than 1.5GB even if it's running a bit slower.