In practice, as long as the channels are equally filled, I believe there should be no performance or capacity limitations. The key point however is to fill the different memory channels equally, and this is likely provided as an 'idiot-proof' instruction, rather than instructing the user to just fill the channels equally. Note: 'Furthest from the CPU' comes from the motherboard manual of my recent PC build (ASUS motherboard) and may not be what is stated for all motherboards. As such, you may also see DIMM slots referred to as RAM slots. The different colours signify the channel used for the RAM in that slot - so in a Dual channel system, there are two colours, and three in a triple channel system.įor performance, you should be using both channels, so if you have two dimms, this rule of thumb will result in one slot for each channel being filled first. DIMM (dual in-line memory module) slots are the place on your motherboard where the RAM goes.

This is your 'Always in adjacent slots, but with differring color' option. Populate the RAM slots starting from the slot furthest from the CPU. Yeah, but in this case you are wrong (no offence or pun intended) :-) I guess AsRock got black memory slots on sale or something But yeah, you have two channels: Channel A and Channel B - you want to cross-fit your sticks to A1+B1 (to both channels -> Dual channel).