Well, 333 will work, technically, but not on all four slots. I wish I had a scanner handy to show how this chart reads, but basically you can only have two 400's or two 333's of whatever, or you can have all four 266. It's a pretty wee taw did setup. Also, in hindsight, maybe I should have ponied up an extra ten bucks or so and gone with a 516MB video card. Oh well. For twenty bucks, it's an improvement, and this system will only do so much as it sits, anyhow. I could poke in four sticks of 266 Mhz RAM to get it up to 4 GB ($30 a stick, $120 for a set of four), and tack on a rockin' video card better than the one I have on order (one of those 1 GB cards in the $120 range would be nice), but I don't have that kind of loose change to be throwing at this anytime soon. Maybe when tax time comes, I'll pimp my own ride up a bit more. I might just try pulling two sticks of the RAM I have to make it stable and see how it handles the L4D2 demo. Who knows, it might not even make a difference. I mean, the system actually recognizes that there's 2 GB of RAM present (it shows 2 GB during the POST test and in Windows), but I don't think it's actually utilizing all four DIMM slots and it's only actually using one pair or the other due to the motherboard's limitations. It didn't seem to load any faster or slower with two sticks removed.
that just doesnt make sense to me, the amd 64's have their memory controllers on the chip, so the board shouldnt matter.... now i do know that some of the earlier 64 chips needed registered/eec memory to be able to either run 4 sticks or certain sizes of modules (forgot which). i know my last 939 board (asus a8r32) ran 4 sticks of ddr400 just fine with a 4000 cpu, and iirc i ran my old abit av8/3200 board that way once too.
I dunno. All I know for sure is that running 2 sticks (any pair, doesn't matter which two of the four), I never have any problem, but if I have all four plugged in, every other time I power it on I get the beeping issue. What's also strange is that looking back on the reviews for my motherboard (just the basic ABIT KN8, not the Ultra or SLI versions) and the specs on it listed everywhere online state that it supports the use of DDR 400 on all four DIMM's. But what the chart in the manual states does not seem to jive with that, as it insists you can only use two DDR 400's on either DIMM 1 and 2 **OR** on DIMM 3 and 4, and nothing else in conjunction with that. I did verify that when I run all four sticks, it actually DOES use all four of them because of the settings that I can use on the Left 4 Dead 2 demo, plus the fact that it loads faster when I switch from one thing to another, and it doesn't clip out a bunch of details like it does when I'm only running one pair of sticks. So, on the bright side of things, when it works, it actually works. Another bright side of this was that even though going to ABIT's site and updating my BIOS with the latest flash utility and latest BIOS update didn't fix the RAM issue, it did at least speed up my initial boot-up process for some reason - it used to sit there for a couple of seconds on the "Verifying VMI" thing, but now it just blinks through there right quick with a "Successful" result. So, at least I didn't hurt anything in poking around with that deal.
