Differense betven Dualsided and Singlesided sdram modules?

[Technoid]

What is the Differense betven Dualsided and Singlesided sdram modules?

[Himself]

I don't believe it indicates anything, it's just how they made them. There is a program called CTSPD that can tell you more about your ram, whether it's cas 2 or cas 3, how many banks it has, whether it has a working spd chip etc. You can find it via http://www.viahardware.com/, they mention it in their WPCREDIT article.

[Technoid]

Himself,

I thought so myself but you newer know

[Wombat]

Dual-sided just means that they didn't have dense enough chips to get away with only one side. Be careful, since it sometimes causes problems mixing double- and single-sided DIMMS in the same motherboard. Also, some motherboards have more slots than they can support sides (The Epox 8KTA3 has 4 DIMM slots, but two can only take single-sided).

[RAB]

Correct me if I'm wrong, guys, but each populated side is considered a bank. So when setting you bank interleave in BIOS, set it for a number that's equal to or greater than the number of sides that have chips on them. For example, if you have two sticks with two sides populated on each, set your BIOS memory interleave to 4 banks.

RAB

[Himself]

It might indicate something within a manufacturer, but not as a general rule, you either use larger chips or more smaller chips, for a given capacity you have to use two sides. I'd guess it's more about economics and inventories than performance.

It's also about keeping the board paths balanced, you could make a ram module one inch wide and 4 high single sided if you wanted to but it wouldn't have the same distance for signals to travel for each chip so it would be rated for the longest path. I would prefer fewer chips myself, the more than is done within a package the less chance of the board being an issue, but I wouldn't trade a lot of really fast smaller chips for a few larger but slower chips.

[paulcs]

You have to be careful about this with certain motherboards. The i815-series of chipsets has "row" limitations at 133 MHz. There are two rows per DIMM slot. A double-sided DIMM will occupy both rows in the slot. At 100 MHz, you can populate all three slots (or all six rows) with double-sided RAM. At 133 MHz, you should only use four rows (or two slots). It doesn't matter with single-sided RAM, because three DIMM's will only occupy three rows.

Crucial's 128 MB "7E" stuff used to be double-sided (CT16M64S4D7E.16T). However, I purchased a stick last month and it came in the single-sided configuration (CT16M64S4D7E.8T).

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Greebe]

Paul, the two sticks of 128 meg "7E" I purchased last spring were single sided also

[paulcs]

Sure, Mike. You probably don't have a motherboard that cares one way or the other.

I probably have five Crucial 128 MB DIMM's. I think all but one are double-sided. Fortunately, only the CUSL-C cares.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[SteveC]

A while ago (when RAM was silly money), I remember that the only PC-100 stuff we could get hold of was double height, double sides things! God they were nasty things, but somehow they were PC-100!

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Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"