Solved Memory - when 2 slots become 4

When using Dual channel memory on a motherboard with 2 slots does
slot 1 become 1 & 3 while slot 2 becomes 2 & 4?

My friend in 2011 bought a new desktop by my recommendation and her card.
Acer Aspire AX3950-UR30P - i3 CPU - 4GB PC3 10700 RAM - Windows 7 64-bit
She called me about a link for her to order memory.
I went to my folder of purchased products webpages to look up specs, it said 4 slots total with 2 slots available
Went to Crucial to see if they might recommend 800MHz instead of 667MHz?
Both said it has 4 slots.
I downloaded & ran CPU-Z on her computer thru Logmein it said, slots 1 & 3 each have 2GB while 2 & 4 are empty
She ordered 4GB (2x2GB)
It arrived, she brought her computer over and guess what
Only 2 slots & 1 is empty.

Is this wrong or is my definition of dual channel memory wrong?

Check under the keyboard.

JLyman said:

Check under the keyboard.

Click to expand...

what does that do?

pcRat said:

JLyman said:

Check under the keyboard.

Click to expand...

what does that do?

Click to expand...

Some laptops require removing the keyboard to access some of the memory slots.

As the Acer Aspire AX3950-UR30P is a desktop, that is irrelevant.

The motherboard chipset supports 4 DIMM slots. Maybe Acer only built in two because this is a SFF (small form factor) system. To coin a phrase, that would suck. Especially if the system doesn't support DIMMs larger than 2GB.

I haven't been able to find a manual specific to the system, or an image of its motherboard. Acer doesn't make a hardware-specific manual available for download.

I'd be surprised if Crucial had the number of DIMM slots wrong for the model, but they claim 4 (I checked). I presume that you can count the number of slots.

I saw some X3950 motherboards on ebay, but I'm not sure that they were SFF models. The only odd things were that the locks on two of the memory slots were white, and the other two black. All 4 slots were black. I hope that your friend's board is like that, and that the black locks somehow fooled you into missing two of the DIMM slots.

Good luck.

It definitely has to be a SFF. The tower is.
I took the cover off 3 times to check and even had others look.

Maybe 2 slots are covered by DVD or something. I've never seen that before but always a first time. Especially with this SFF.
I have slid hdd forward before to access memory.

Sure would be nice to find a diagram of the aspire ax3950-ur30p motherboard.

bobkn said:

pcRat said:

JLyman said:

Check under the keyboard.

Click to expand...

what does that do?

Click to expand...

Some laptops require removing the keyboard to access some of the memory slots.

As the Acer Aspire AX3950-UR30P is a desktop, that is irrelevant.



Good luck.

Click to expand...

I COMPLETELY missed that part....

It had 4 slots. I feel better after my stupid pills wore off!

Well my case is interesting also as my laptop manual and retailers says my laptop has 2 slots for memory and it came with 4gb pre installed, I have bought 2x 4gb memory and my windows 8 pro 64bit shows it correctly BUT it also says that 2/4 slots are in use.
It says that in task manager is it just false info or is there somewhere a hidden memory slots.

My mobo also reports 4 slot but it has 2, that's because the CPU memory controller supports 4 but the mobo has 2 slots wired

atomi said:

Well my case is interesting also as my laptop manual and retailers says my laptop has 2 slots for memory and it came with 4gb pre installed, I have bought 2x 4gb memory and my windows 8 pro 64bit shows it correctly BUT it also says that 2/4 slots are in use.
It says that in task manager is it just false info or is there somewhere a hidden memory slots.

Click to expand...

Laptops aren't all identical.

If you tell us what yours is (complete model number), we could check whether it has slots under the keyboard or elsewhere.

Well its samsung NP-Q530-JT02SE and it's Fi/Swe Scandinavian model, when I upgraded my memory 4gb to 8gb I checked that it only had 2 memory ports.