So last night I brought a COMPUTER back from the dead. It was a tower that was thrown away after the user said it got struck by lightning and wont work. I offered to take it off there hands if they are just throwing it away and I'd dispose of it for them. They gladly accepted since dumps charge to get rid of computers these days.

I was able to get it running after removing the dead 56k modem that had burned traces. I was amazed that the power supply and everything else was fine and this 56k modem was what was keeping the system from booting and the damage stopped at the modem and didnt blow out the PCI bus.

I contacted the owner and they said they dont need the computer I can still have it since I felt guilty that it was just a bad modem causing it to fail to boot. So it is a Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz E4300 HP Pavilion a6010n Tower with Vista and it came with 1GB ( 2 x 512MB sticks of 533Mhz DDR2 Ram ). The minute I got word that it was mine and the guilt was gone that they might want it back if it was this simple of a fix I dug into my spare parts stash and loaded it up with 533Mhz PC-4200 Ram and a GeForce 8400GS PCIe video card and even dug out a Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz E6600 that I will probably upgrade it to when arctic silver shows up from newegg.

I installed Ram into all 4 Ram slots, but I was like well it will be single-channel with mismatched sticks but 2.5GB of Ram is BETTER than 1GB dual-channel, so I installed a 1GB stick into slot 1, and 512MB sticks into slots 2, 3, and 4. I then booted it off of knoppix to run the memtest86 which is built into it to make sure that of the 4 sticks, each stick plays well with others as for mixing sizes and brands is just asking for trouble usually, but SOMETIMES they play well with others. Memtest86 stats show DUAL CHANNEL ENABLED and its passing all the memory tests.

So... Can you actually run Dual Channel with mismatched sized sticks as 1GB, 512MB, 512MB, and 512MB populating all 4 Ram slots or is this false INFO? I assume that if memtest86 is happy with it, maybe it is running dual channel with mismatched Ram. The 1GB stick I would have thought would break the ability to dual channel as for it was my assumption that dual channel only worked if you had LIKE size Ram and slots 1,3 or 1,3 and 2, 4 populated.Simple answer...No.Thanks for confirming this Patio!

I guess Memtest86 LIES...LOL If a motherboard supports Dual Channel, you will get the best performance if you INSTALL matched pairs of identical spec RAM modules in each channel. So if you have 4 slots (2 channels) you can put 2 x 2 GB in one channel and 2 x 1GB in the other. If the modules in the same channel have different timings or sizes, you will take a performance hit because the usually memory controller will drop to single channel mode. However, memory controllers are fetting more flexible these days, but I guess an HP a6010n is not the most modern hardware.
Memory controllers can use "flex mode" which enables dual channel support (after a fashion) with mismatched module sizes.
This is available on most modern Intel chipsets and should be supported by your system.
In any case, dual vs single channel makes almost no difference even in synthetic benchmarks, so don't sweat it.However "flex mode" is not exactly dual-channel...it simulates it...

But i agree with the last part.Thanks for the info. Going to read into Flex-Mode. Since the original post I ended up downgrading to 2GB vs 2.5GB as for I started having some stabilization issues when multitasking. Now stabile on ( 512MB, 1GB, 512MB, Empty ) as slots populated from 1 thru 4. All sticks were 533Mhz, but the kingston 512MB even though passing multiple memtest86 passes seemed to cause the system to lag and freeze up at times even though memtest said all was well.

BTW ever since going down to 3 sticks from 4 sticks memtest86 now reports Single-Channel mode. And the system no longer lags or freeze ups multitasking.

Now running Windows 7 32-bit healthy and quick on 2GB. And upgraded the CPU to Pentium E6600 Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz for faster processing and 2x the cache.This 2G is all off of 512 stiks ? ?No 2 x 512MB and 1 x 1GB ( 3 of 4 slots populated and 1 empty ) = 2GB


http://ark.intel.com/products/27720/Intel-82945G-Memory-Controller Looked up the chipset of the motherboard P5LP-LE ASUS motherboard and the 945G doesnt have Flex-Memory feature, so Flex Memory Mode wont function on my MoBo.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00864946&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=3377270 Here is my motherboard specs etc.
Not to shoot out your sails here but from my experience dual channel only works successfully with dual stiks of RAM and matched sizes/speeds...

Ain't gonna happen in this scenario...www.hwinfo.com will tell you if it's running dual-channel.
(512MB, 1GB, 512MB, Empty) will not be dual-channel unless you remove the 1GB.Kinda said that awhile ago...Quote

BTW ever since going down to 3 sticks from 4 sticks memtest86 now reports Single-Channel mode. And the system no longer lags or freeze ups multitasking.