PC component grumble

[charlesr]

One of the RAM slots on my mobo has died. There are 4 slots.
I had 2X4GB sticks.

If you are only using 2 sticks, they have to go into slots A1 and B1. A2 and B2 can only be used if 4 sticks. B1 is dead.
So I'm left with slot A1, but if you only use A1, the mobo only supports single channel, so I now have 2GB of RAM.

Excellent. Not.

It's a 1156 mobo with an i5. My i5 is not compatible with the 1155s that are now on sale everywhere.
So I need to buy a new mobo and CPU.

I wonder if my RAM will also need replacing.... DDR3 1600

[speedlolita]

RAM will be fine.

[briareos_kerensky]

Slot pairing should be mostly about dual/triple/quad channel. Does the mobo manual clearly specify to use the "2" slots only with 4 modules?

[charlesr]

From the manual:
One DIMM: Slot A1 or B1 single channel operation
Two DIMMs: Slot A1 and B1

Am I missing understanding what "single channel" means? Why am I only getting 2GB reported in bios when it's a 4GB stick?

[Brad]

replacement 1156 m/board from eBay for ?25ish?

[Digfox]

From the manual:
One DIMM: Slot A1 or B1 single channel operation
Two DIMMs: Slot A1 and B1

Am I missing understanding what "single channel" means? Why am I only getting 2GB reported in bios when it's a 4GB stick?

Single or Dual-channel has nothing to do with the total RAM on the memory module. As mentioned the manual is simply specifiying what memory slots need to be used for Dual-Channel mode.

What happens if you run the stick in B1, or A2/B2 slots?

In the real world applications the difference is no-where near the 2 times theoretical speed difference. I don't bother running Tripple-channel on my ageing i7 920/X58 platform any more and don't suffer becuase of it.

That said I'm not sure why your BIOS only reports 2GB instead of 4GB. Do you have any other DDR3 to test?

[charlesr]

Cheers for the info.
I found a lot of people on search results suffering the same problem on similar Asus mobos. Weird.
So, I went to novatech.co.uk and treated myself to a new Gigabyte mobo and i5-4960. So now everything is super whizzy and I have USB3 and everything works again.