I fried my computer.

[Ellusionist]

i don't want to hijack the thread or anything but because you guys are on the topic of RAM i have a quick question for any/all of you.

so the new core i7 MoBo's take a maximum of 24G of DDR3 RAM and have 6 240 pin RAM slots, my question is this. are there any 4G sticks of DDR3 RAM currently on the market? i can only find 2G sticks maximum of DDR3. there are some DDR2 sticks that are 4G each, but i can't seem to find any 4G DDR3 sticks no matter how hard i look. if anybody know of any and has a link to where to buy it i would really appreciate it!

Thanks everybody! ^_^

~YYF

I can't answer your question directly, but I can explain a little bit about DDR3 and possibly why DDR3 is only available in multiples of 3.

I'm going to take a totally wild guess.

First of all: DDR3 is more efficient, power-wise. It runs at 1.5V instead of DDR2's 1.8V.

DDR2's speed is figured by taking the base memory clock speed and multiplying it by two of the processor's clock cycles. This is why DDR2-667 memory only runs at 333MHz.

...here comes the part where I'm making an educated guess...

Core i7 chips have three memory channels. This would mean instead of multiplying the "base" memory speed by two, it's multiplied by three. This allows the memory to run at a lower speed, but perform better. (And, as I originally stated, use less power.)

Examples:
[1.8V] DDR2 @ 667MHZ (really equals) 333 x 2
[1.5V] DDR3 @ 800MHz (really equals) 266 x 3

DDR3 is using less power because each channel is running at a lower speed, but with more overall throughput.

Like I said, I can't answer your question directly about DDR3 capacity, but I'd say the 3x multiplier has something to do with it.