Tech Talk

So I upgraded my PC about a month back, installed all the stuff and then I noticed something, when my PC was booting it would say

Memory: 1333 MHz unganged mode

This is odd cuz I have 1600 MHz RAM and no idea what unganged meant, but didn't seem to effect my PC so I left it.

Last night I was having some problems and I finally got around to seeing what that meant...

1333 MHz seems to be some timing error with all BIOS having this new ganging thing, so I flipped from auto to just setting it to what it should be, 1600 MHz

And then I looked at what unganging is...Basically its where the RAM is divided by stick and dedicated to a CPU core and only that core can access that RAM, while ganging doesn't dedicate any of the RAM to either core and lets all cores access all RAM.

The benefits of unganging memory are easily seen if you run things that can take advantage of multi-cores, but if a majority of the things you are running only uses 1 core, the ultimately you are not getting the full benefit of your memory, but then your multi-core programs aren't running as fast as they could when you gange memory.

This is an especially difficult thing to decide as it is not common knowledge how to find and where to find whether the things you are running are running multi-core or not so it becomes are hard decision to decide what to do...


My experienced thus far...Some programs take a little longer to load up, but ultimately they run better it seems and basic functions that used to oddly took a few seconds now work fine. Though I think this is because windows is the only program I run that is running with multi-cores.


So what are your opinions on unganging and ganging? experiences? and is it such a good idea that AMD has it set to default on their BIOS? when at the moment most don't know what it is and most probably don't have systems that take advantage of it and worse, their new system could perform worse than their older system due to always having worked with ganged memory in the past. (people still don't get 4GB+ of RAM from what I can see and most only get 2 which means they are literally running most things with 1GB of RAM)

Thanks for the info and tips. Sadly my computer is so old the only gang it has is a gang of gerbils on treadmills inside it.

May get more opinions in the tech forum, though Father Xmas and BillZ have been seen here a lot lately...

That sub-forum is not for talking about technology. It is about looking for help related to the game and how to fix problems such as bugs/glitches in the game or to simply report them.

When AMD designed the Phenom core, they added a feature that allowed the two channels to memory to operate independently. Besides both being used to read from or write to memory they could be split so one would be writing to memory while the other is reading from memory.

It has nothing to do with single or dual channel or assigning individual memory sticks to each core.

Here's a couple of articles that benchmarks that mode.

As for the 1333MHz vs 1600MHz, do you have 2 or 4 sticks of memory? Reason I'm asking is I vaguely remember hearing about a problem getting 4 sticks of 1600MHz memory to run reliably with a Phenom or Phenom II.

Well like a lot of memory benchmarks I've seen, you are only ever squezzing out a percent or three with either faster, lower latency or in this case ganged/unganged. It's just that with huge caches and improved prefetch logic, what would seem to be huge differences in memory benchmarks are seriously muted in most actual applications.

Digging around I was slightly wrong, I'm remembering this from 18 months ago. The key point here is at standard DDR3 voltage of 1.5 volts. Most higher speed RAM already require a higher voltage to operate at their rated speed and timings.