Enabling 16 GB RAM on Intel P35 motherboard

[Anuja Darzi]

I have an Intel’s P35 motherboard in my computer which has capability to have 8GB DDR3 RAM. It has two slots for RAM and thus I have attached two sticks of RAM each of memory 8GB. The frequency and other attributes are similar and thus I expect it to become 16 GB overall. I started my system and checked about the amount of total RAM that is showed in the specifications. It showed only 8 GB instead of 16 GB. Can someone help me enabling the other RAM along with this one?

[Edha]

Though your motherboard has capacity to accept two RAMs on it, maybe the BIOS doesn’t have that capabilities. You can search for the appropriate BIOS version from Intel’s official website, which will be compatible with your motherboard as well as provide support for two RAMs of 8GB. Updating BIOS of your motherboard to that version might help you enabling 16 GB RAM on your motherboard.

Once you have found proper version of BIOS update for your system, you can check its performance by using DPC Latency checker. It will check for the spikes in performance of the RAM. A 16 GB RAM can run on 400 MHz system bus which will give output of 1600 MHz FSB. This is equivalent to 50% overclocking of the motherboard and memory will work at ratio of 1:1.

[LohitPratap]

Using such high end RAM that too in overclocked mode will generate a lot amount of heat. You will need to add some more heatsinks or maybe some more cooling fans to your system. You should also provide a good airflow as it plays a great role in performance of any system. Another thing you can try for better overclocking is changing the value of multiplier to 2.0. It is preferable if you tweak the options related to RAMs memory management manually. I don’t know much about Intel’s motherboards, but Asus and Evga provides a good amount of options to change the amount of memory settings.