Or at least they don’t know things that they really should know.
For instance. When you have four RAM slots and only two sticks of RAM you should put each stick in the identically coloured slot. NOT next to each other.
I am not a PC builder. I found this out today. My RAM has been put in wrong for the nearly two years I’ve had my PC.
My RAM had a windows vista performance score of 4.8. I’ve just moved one of the dimms to the twin of the slot the other one’s in, and my score has jumped to 5.4. It’s only a 12 percent increase, but it suggests that the people who built my PC didn’t know what I would expect should be an obvious fact if your job is to build PCs!
Check your ram. check what slots it’s in.
So the builders should know what the rule is for my particular board.
And the fact that this was told to me by someone with experience building PCs who has no idea what board I have, suggests that it’s a convention.
eta: So I guess to extend on the little bit of advice at the end of my OP: Check out what the situation is for your particular mobo. Can memory go in any slot? Or does it need to be in specific slots in order to be running in dual channel mode (which I suspect would be the case).
Dual channel memory will need to go in whichever pairing of slots the mfg has used. You’ll have to see the manual for that. Sometimes it’s alternating slots, sometimes adjacent slots.
But it’s almost always the slots with matching colors. This has been the case on every motherboard with dual channel support that I have handled.
I’ve seen some custom PC building services tout this as an extra. If you specify a matched pair of memory modules in your build, they give you the option of a dual channel installation for a $10 fee. That’s right: it takes exactly the same amount of effort to install the modules either way, but they’ll charge you ten bucks extra to not do it the wrong way.
OK, so, whether the slots are next to each other or not, the same-coloured slots should be prioritized for the first sticks of ram to go in. So if there are two sticks then they go in the same coloured slots.
And if the mobo happens to be one that doesn’t have different coloured slots then the PC builder should spend 5 or 10 minutes googling or reading the mobo manual to find out where the dimms should go or if they need to go in specific slots at all (if they’re not dual channel, or the mobo doesn’t support dual channel, or the mobo is clever enough to recognise dual channel dimms wherever they’re placed)
So the PC builder should, in any case, do the job right. And if building PCs is his primary job then even more so! My point being that the job wasn’t done right.
And, if they are a company that will charge extra to assign a different person (one who knows how to google, or read) to do the job right, then… words fail.
