Memory in slots 1 and 3 vs 0 and 2?

[DaveLembke]

Friend of mine brought me his old gaming rig last night running a Athlon 64 x2 4200+ socket 939 on normally 2GB RAM with Vista, because the high end at the time of release ( A8N-SLI Premium ASUS ) motherboard on boot yells over the speaker port about a memory failure. With a single 1GB stick in slot 0 its happy running single-channel. Tested both sticks with memtest86 in slot 0 and they are happy. Placing both sticks together in slots 0 and 1 gives 2GB RAM single-channel and memtest86 passes with no problems. Found that for some reason slot 2 is bad. Either something blown on the board or a contact issue of some kind. I moved his sticks to slots 1 and 3 and dual-channel is working for 2GB ( 2 x 1GB DDR PC3200 OCZ ) high end sticks.

I gave him his system back with it running on slots 1 and 3 vs 0 and 2, and is there any issues that might arise from this not so common memory configuration as for in years past I was told always to populate slot 0 and then you either populate 0 with 1 or 0 with 2 for dual-channel boards, but slots 1 and 3 for dual-channel to skip slot 2 and maintain dual-channel is something I have never had to do before as a work around for a memory slot failure.

The odd thing about this failure is that he had been gaming playing BF2 and then in crashed on him with memory failure and it then came up with memory error on boot and so he brought it to me. He wasnt messing with RAM sticks to damage anything and the inside of the computer is actually clean for its age with no grime in the slots etc. So I am thinking that a motherboard component likely failed since the RAM sticks both are fine and that slot no matter what is placed into it gives memory failures. There are a whole bunch of micro surface mount components between the slots and maybe one of them died, but didnt take down the memory bus completely. 

[Calum]

Using slots 1 and 3 vs 0 and 2 won't cause any issues, it's fairly common for anyone using larger CPU coolers to be unable to use the closest slot to the CPU anyway.  I know every single X58 system with 6 RAM slots I've ever built has used slots 1, 3 and 5 rather than 0, 2 and 4 just out of habit.

[DaveLembke]

Cool thx for confirmation that its an ok config. I havent come across any heatsinks that conflict with memory slots yet, just one that was too tall for the side cover to be installed. It was a large ring with a fan and heat pipes looped through it that was for a deeper ( wider ) gaming case and a 15 year old brought to be asking for my advice on what to do... which was to run it with the side panel off, swap the guts into a gaming case that will fit it, go back to the stock cooler if it was running cool to begin with, or take a dremmel to the side panel and cut out a square area for the heatsink to stick out of the side of the case and then leave it exposed this way or fabricate  something to make it not look so bad.

He ended up going back to the stock cooler on the Pentium E5400 dual-core, and there was no need to upgrade the heatsink with an overkill heatsink anyways. I think he was doing it to show off to friends with intention to being able to pop the side panel off and make the $400 HP desktop mATX tower look like a higher end gaming system. He ended up selling this heatsink on ebay because the place he bought it from only had a replacement warranty on it but no money back once opened and used.