Memory channel exhausted problem.......

[sbj]

hello people, got a problem i need resolving as ive exhausted several google reads and even emailed my supplier (Scan, bolton), with conflicting advice throughout...
I recently purchased a new system and mistakenly bought memory for a triple channel board. Mine is the Dual channel board Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H with Corsair XMS3 6104 MB (DDR3-1333 DDR3 SDRAM) which is 3x2gb sticks.
My query is....Scan have told me its running in Single channel and i have to "buy" dual pack or quad pack for the best performance but CPU-Z is telling me there is 6gb there and its running in dual channel (obviously only 2 sticks).
So........what do i do, and which one is right? Do i leave it as dual+1 channel memory (if its running like that) or do i sell them and buy a dual channel pack, or do i buy one more similar stick (if i can get one) and they all run in dual channel (as my old pc did interleaved 4x1gb sticks) how much performance am i missing? As it is a gaming rig really
It is a situation that is still one that is being argued among several forums!
Hope you can shed some light....cause my eyes hurt
Thanks.

[GoNz0]

buy a single stick the same as the other 3. never had an issue adding ram this way, you pay more for "matching pairs" but i would like to see how many get thrown in the single only bin, none for a guess!

[sbj]

cant the Corsair XMS3 CMX6GX3M3A1600C9 only comes as dual, triple or quad sets...sneaky if you only want one more....

[GoNz0]

if it's the 1600 then yes your stuck at that, you could get a 1333 stick, they would all run at the lower speed. not that you would notice a performance drop in real world terms.

[sbj]

yes they are the 1600's (even though you have to make the "turbo" option in bios to get them to 1600), otherwise they are factory set at 1300, and no warning you must do that for any person who's not wise to this!.
Ok ill leave them seeing as you say the performance wont be noticeable...thanks!

[DanceswithUnix]

Not having symmetrical memory configurations used to be such a no-no that it still makes me feel uneasy and many still think it matters. Whilst there may be workloads when it does matter, for most people it doesn't any more.

The memory isn't driven as a pair in one wide 128 bit interface, modern systems drive the two 64 bit channels independantly. This is called "unganged" mode.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-c...ersus_unganged

Integrated graphics on something like an AMD Trinity CPU may benefit from balanced channels still as the graphics kind of acts like a very memory hungry core, no idea I haven't seen any tests on that.

[oralpain]

Three DIMMs of 2GiB in size on the LGA-1155 platform (and 1156, 1366, 2011, as well as later 775 platforms) means you are in dual channel channel mode for the first four GiB of physical memory addresses and single channel for the remaining 2GiB.

There is nothing wrong with this, and given modern memory requirements, it's probably a lot better to have 3x2 than 2x2, even in a dual channel board.

The SCAN representative is mostly wrong.

Not having symmetrical memory configurations used to be such a no-no that it still makes me feel uneasy and many still think it matters.

Outside of significant memory overclocking, it hasn't been a problem on most Intel platforms in ~8 years.

Many AMD platforms work the same way. Even back in the Socket A NForce 2 days, I ran 3x512MiB dual-channel without issue, heavily OCed.