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. When Benjamin ordered the new RAM, he made sure that it had the same number of pins. He did some research and found that his motherboard will support 4GB of RAM in each of the two slots. He currently has two DDR3 DIMMs, and each one has 2GB of RAM. 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. Benjamin needs to upgrade his RAM so that he can play the latest version of his favorite game. 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. This is your 'Always in adjacent slots, but with differring color' option. Link to your motherboard manual here (PDF link).Populate the RAM slots starting from the slot furthest from the CPU. There are no distinction in utility for all 4 ports, black SATA ports are ports 1 & 2, and red SATA ports are ports 3 & 4. You only have 4 SATA ports on your M2A-VM. If you were to tell us your motherboard model, we could probably ID them for you.ĮDIT : Found the port layout schematics for your M2A-VM. Some manufacturers might even color ports just to help user ID what ports to use for an eSATA bracket.

The color that has even number of ports (usually 2) are RAID-capable (if your motherboard supports it, and I've seen yellow and red), and the secondary SATA controller ports are usually red in color. Usually, the color that has the most ports are the Primary SATA controller ports (usually black). You will have to refer to the manual that came with your motherboard for clearer identification.Ĭommonly, SATA ports on a motherboard that has different colors can be categorized as such:

It really depends on your motherboard - there is no standardization as to what colors mean for SATA ports on different motherboards.

Blue and grey ram slots