m11x ram issue 5.9 not 6 gb

Hey all. Question. I have a 4 gB stick of pc10600 ram and a 2 gb pc8500 ram and shows a total of six in windows system. No issues. Will these two sticks run perfect together ie dual mode etc...

Secondly I put another 2 gb pc10600 stick in trying match memory speed with the 4gb stick ... would this be better than above? When I do this, windows only sees 5.9 gb instead of flat six. Any ideas?

Ben

 

first of all, you shouldn't really use different speeds of memory.

i'm not a hardware expert, but i assume by the way the RAM splits up memory that it will downclock the pc10600 ram to the speeds of the 8500 ram.

and to get the full use of speed, you should use equivalent size sticks. with different size RAM sticks you're only going to achieve DDR transfer rates on 2GB of your 4GB stick.

you might be better off doing 2x2gb sticks - do you really need 6gb of memory? what are you using the m11x for? also i don't even know if the m11x makes full usage of the 1333mhz memory since i think it auto downclocks the speed of the stock memory which i believe is 1066mhz, so i don't think you need the pc10600 memory in there as you're not getting full usage from it unless you're doing some overclocking elsewhere.

and the 100mb that you're missing is probably due to the OS dedicating 100mb of space for something like dumping specific data to it.

 

Im pretty sure that space is just being reserved by the OS. You have 6gb of ram dont worry. As far as the types you have, I agree 100% with Levenly. You should have two of the same.

 

Yep that's why they come in kits. Kits are more stable than random RAM thrown in together.

Either way you are running 6GB, the system will reserve a few MBs here and there.

 

Ok so if I have the two pc10600 sticks in that is better than mix and match.. will it be dual channel for 4 of the 6 gb.... guess I could just run cpuz and see.

Only reason doing this was I was given a four gig ddr3 stick so had an extra space.

So best advice is to use the four gig and 2 gig of the same speed?

 

Yes that would be best. Also I think it was mentioned somewhere that the 6GB configuration does not run in dual channel, but that might just be from Dell's configuration.

 

You guys seem to be missing the point that the M11x because of its old Core 2 Duo chipset downlclocks the RAM to DDR2 speeds anyway. Dell only use the faster RAM in it because they have more access to it. Therefore I dont see any real benefit in the faster memory on this system.