Got RAM? Is It Installed Right?

I own an MSI(Microstar)K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLi (nForce4) motherboard. It has 4 DIMMs slots - 1 and 3 are green and 2 and 4 are purple. My machine has been running with matching pairs of 1GB DDR400, 128-bit RAM in slots 1 and 3 for I donno how long. My assumption was that matched pairs go into the color coded slots. But I failed to notice

, until last night, that the BIOS was treating my Double-sided RAM as DDR 200, 64-bit; single-sided RAM. And it's been running fine and stable for years. The BIOS was protecting the motherboard, and I mistakenly thought I was getting the full performance of my RAM.

I also had a pair of 512MB Ballistix RAM in slots 2 and 4. My computer started to freeze, and throw Blue Screens. When I removed the Ballistix RAM, the computer seemed to work fine again. But when I installed a couple of 9600GT graphics cards to try out SLi, my computer started freezing in Vista.

I was desperate for something new to try, to make my machine stable again. I had the mobo booklet, but I just didn't understand the chart. Then it hit me, matched pairs of Double-sided DDR400 RAM should go in slots 1 and 2, not 1 and 3. As soon as I made the change, the BIOS reported DDR400, 128-bit, and my computer was stable again. What's more, my computer is immensely faster now.

The moral of this story is not to let the color coding of the DIMM slots fool you. Your RAM might not be installed correctly either, like mine was. But a quick check of you mobo's instructions might shed light on how to install your RAM properly. If your RAM is not installed correctly, you could mistakenly think you need to reload Windows, or replace some other hardware component. The PC doesn't ever tell you what the problem is, when there's a problem, and it can seem hopeless to figure it out. I hope this blog entry saves you some time.