RAM myth?

[redCashion]

I have heard on a board (not even sure if it was this one) someone mention that they were getting glitches in their recording when they had an "irregular" amount of RAM in their computer. IE, they had a 254 stick and two 64s, removed the 64s and were fine. I have exactly this set-up, and am still getting warbles and clicks even after countless runs of optimizationing this and that and everything I can think of. I discounted this when I heard it, but now am almost left without any other ideas. Does this sound like it could be a problem? Also can "incompatible" RAM be an issue? I bought the 264 stick without knowing anything about the two sticks that were already in there.

Btw, I will be trying removing the 2 smaller sticks after work today but was wondering what people thought about it in the meantime.

 

[Slackmaster2K]

Typically RAM mismatches will result in an unstable system. Randomish crashes, lockups, data corruption, etc.

Clicks and pops are the result of a bottleneck someplace in the system (hardware or drivers or software).

It is possible, albeit rare, for memory to slow a system down:

1) Sometimes there is not enough cache on the board to cover the entire memory range, and this can cause slowdown. Very rare though.

2) Higher latency memory *might* cause slowdown. However, I have only seen a few demonstratable circumstances in which was the case, and usually higher latency didn't slow a system down as much as lower latency stuff sped it up, if you know what I mean. (BTW, the circumstances in which I've read evidence of this involved overclocking to quite high bus speeds)

Go ahead and take your two 64MB sticks out and if the sytem speeds back up and your clicks and pops are gone, then assume #1 above.

Really, there is no reason to have more than 256MB in a DAW setup anyhow, unless you're doing other things, graphics, video, etc. Watch your memory usage sometime while recording, you'll see that memory usage even over 128MB is rare, although it will be close enough to 128MB to justify 256MB (the closer you get to your physical limit, the more caching you'll see, & feel)

Slackmaster 2000