Ordered the RAM on March 14th and got them in on April 4th, so as expected for a shipment from China, it takes a while. Threw them in the machine and got a successful post to BIOS and boot to Win10. The stock settings were 6-5-5-13 @ 800Mhz, but that proved unstable with errors in Memtest86 and Prime95 – it flat-out crashed Memtest64 in Win10 when it tried to allocate beyond 4GB. So as suggested, and inline with the one review left on eBay, I tried running them at 5-5-5-15 @ 533Mhz and got rock-solid performance on all three tests. Confirmed they are true 4GB modules each, and Memtest86 / tests in the Win10 environment confirmed successful allocation to all 16GB.

It’s a shame that the SPD is flashed the way it is, as I’m not the first one to encounter issues with the programmed timing. I feel like they would (or at least would once have) sold just fine had they been flashed as a slower-running, higher-capacity set of modules. It makes me wonder if these wouldn’t work reliably on far more motherboards / Intel systems than the few already confirmed here and in the wild, as it’s clear from posts elsewhere that some have tried this sort of RAM, encountered instability, and called it a day without playing with the timing. Then again, I'm no expert when it comes to RAM, so I may be talking out my rear and not have a clue. 😅

In any case, they’re stable on my end. Whether or not they’re worth the ~$40 going price on eBay for me is yet to be seen, based on how well they perform for my tasks – which are admittedly simple, just a bunch of heavy tabs open on Chrome (usually utilizing 10 - 12GB on my Mac). Now that I’ve got them though, if anyone would like me to play around with the settings or do other tests, etc., just let me know! I don’t mind putting them through the wringer a little to understand them better.

It might also be the memory controller on the proc itself. I don't even know if 16GB is a tested config? Let alone at "full speed" DDR2 800.

Unknown_K wrote:

I have purchased AMD only RAM before with no issues on ebay. The only issue you will have is most DDR2 AMD motherboards (chipsets) have an 8GB RAM Limit and you need to make sure the board you are going to use 4x4GB DIMMs on will do 16GB of RAM.

To be honest I have had more issues with Intel boards being very picky about RAM then AMD.

That is to do with when the board came out thats what they could test, but AM2/AM2+ boards don't have a memory controller, as long as the CPU can see that much memory your fine. Not sure if Athlon 64 X2 can see 16gb of memory, but I know Phenom and its derivatives can see more than even 16gb of ram on its memory controller.

murrayman wrote:

and there's been a lot of hate-mongering in the last couple years over people necroing old threads looking for an answer.

So, what's up with this? Would a set of 4x4gb of this "AMD only" RAM work in my setup? Would it work with any DDR2 motherboard?

I, for one, am in the opposite situation. I have a G41 motherboard (with only 2 slots) and I was banging my head hard on why I'd even be having official 8GB support if this amd only story made sense.
I could find plenty of people with problems indeed, *even* when the chips were the very same mentioned in the QVL.

So I started to look at docs, for this famous "11 bit column address" thingy... But if the firsts Core2 chipsets were even fairly limited, ~P35 and ~P45 most definitively were not.
With the latter officially supporting up to 16GB and 2-Gbit IC density for DDR2.. and the former nonetheless having been tested for 16GB
(on the amd front, where ofc you have to look at the cpus integrating the memory controller instead, here or here there was nothing suspicious to report either.. even though DRAM address mappings counterintuitively seemed to have sometimes an 11th coloumn)
I even went as down as registering on the JEDEC website to check PC2-5300/PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM Unbuffered DIMM Design Specification to understand what raw cards version may or may not be violated (excerpt attached).
And the (2Gb=)256MB x 8 x 2 configuration Intel mentions is expectedly there*.

Then for the love of me I noticed the most laughable of the things: those super duper specially crafted OCZ products everybody talks and seems the culprit.. were 4GBs, as a whole in kits.
Meaning they are just as good as the completely plain KVR800D2N6/2G I already have since 2010.
And from there (realizing that if any whatever AMD's lead, might have only been needed before 2Gbit chips) the narrative shifted**.
You can indeed find #x4GB RAM bundles "perfectly advertised" (and reported) to work on all the 45nm cpus intel chipsets, with no vendor-only bias. Some motherboard manufacturer might even have had issues, but it seemed more of the exception than the rule
And last but not least, it seems like even life on Phenoms isn't all that good.

..Which brings us to my first tentative conclusion: some of these problems could be caused as well from very unlucky combinations of bios settings, timings and/or particular remaining hardware never having been tested in this (back then rare) particular scenario.
With AMD perhaps just being slightly more resilient.. and/or just more people having old Intel cpus (i.e. more share entails both more triumph and mishaps, but nobody cries hard on the internet boards for successes)

But eventually (especially given the odd.. extremes of prices you can see on ebay and similars) I think I'll must settle with the FAKE MEMORY theory (also supposedly discussed here)
AFAIU chinese "recyclers" are repurposing as many 1Gb chips as possible, which necessarily are gonna require 4x widths for 4GB modules. And that's very likely what is only supported on AMD platform, thanks to the one-size-fits-all IMC (which already supports ECC ootb.. probably can also use "RDIMM ranks" when modules happen to fuck up spec and require them)

So TL;DR if you have an Intel DDR2 non-server motherboard, and you want 4GB sticks*** you are gonna need those "normal" "proper" 8x chips, for as much as they might seem a steal compared to the reminder of the offer.
(and even though I don't think anything could stop a good enough pervert half-asser from wiring together the two faces of a module)

*for more information on RAM design, see these articles
**thanks to some new lucky google-fu query I could invent
***of course in the unbuffered(U) fashion. Absolutely no ecc(P), registered(R) or buffered(F)
p.s. f* techpowerup and their nazi necro policies

The DELL C521 has the NVIDIA nForce 430 MCP chipset which is limited to 8GB of RAM I think (4x2GB). The AMD CPU has the memory controller built in going back to the Athlon 64 I think. Intel did the same starting in 2008.

Yes, K8 started the on-die memory controller tradition
But they never had any limitation to speak of, at least since switching to DDR2 with "Rev F" cpus (and especially sensible considering the IMC seems to be shared with the server socket, which could possibly also explain the "extended capabilities" above)

The chipset may still hamper somehow get to influence the system then (if not any, when an igp is present), but nForce 4 with DDR2 memory has no problem addressing up to 16GB.
If any though, manufacturer magic could come in.
E.g. C521 is reported to run at least 10GB with two of those shitty chinese modules.. Unfortunately anything more has difficulties to post.
It's alleged it could be a bios bug - but I say it may be as well the poor motherboard understandably going retard, once you have more questionable SPDs than good ones setting timings.

..I swear I would have never thought some 2008 memory (the proper, non fake, 2Rx8, 2Gb ones) could ever have become such a rarity. So soon at least.
EDIT: just got my hands on these, and they work. Look for hynix H5PS2G83AFR chips I guess?

I have a couple of AM2 boards with a 4GB BIOS limitation.

"Official", or even tested?
Because if I learnt something here, is that datasheets are just "minimum advertised features", not "all that is actually there".

And I could see how some overzealous vendor, on a 2 slot motherboard and thinking the biggest single sticks could ever be is 2GB, might have claimed 4 to be the limit.
OTOH others went "total math" and said 32GB (which would follow if 2Gb 2Rx4 modules existed, and you had four)

Resurrecting this to provide an update if anyone gets a kit and sees the thread:

I took out the kit of RAM not too long after the last post here due to instability. After having it crash once, ran memtest86+ again; it did fine over one pass, but no further.

Recently started using the system again and was really pushing the limits playing Forza Horizon 5 with 8GB of RAM on Win10. Decided to resurrect the kit again and had the same issue. Had a weird thought to try mix-and-matching; and sure enough, three of the 4GB sticks paired up with one of my 2GB g.skill RAM sticks works. Not only does it work, but I can now run the three sticks at SPD spec (the g.skill is rated for much faster timings, so it can match their SPD spec just fine). Memtest86+ and 64 all ran fine over multiple passes over three hours, and not a single crash on any games over several hours.

This might be a motherboard thing, I have no clue. But in case anyone wants to try it themselves, they run fine with my above setup at DDR2 800 unganged with these timings:

These are also the RAM modules I’m using - three of the Samsung, one of the g.skill

Back in 2017 I purchased two 4 GB DDR2 memory sticks of "AMD only" memory on Aliexpress. I paid 13 US dollars for both of them so one stick cost me only $6.50. The memory came, the brand was Atermiter and I ran the sticks on an AsRock N68C-GS FX motherboard along with a three-core AMD Phenom 8450 processor. I never had a problem with this memory - it passed all memory tests I had at the time and it even ran at 800 MHz at 6-6-6-18 timings. The only issue I had was in the BIOS - there the memory was recognized as 16 MB per stick for a total of 32 MB RAM. But in Windows 10 it was seen as 8 GB and Win10 used all of it just fine.

So buying "AMD only" memory worked for me and I was happy with it especially at this price.

I have an MSI 785GT-E63 (https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/785GTE63/Specification) that supports 16gb DDR2 officially, it lists two 4gb modules on the official memory tested list.
Samsung M378T5263AZ3-CE6 DDR2 667 (Samsung K4T2G084QA-HCE6)
Kingston KVR800D2N6/4G (Elpida E2108ABSE-8G-E) DDR2 800
I guess they should word, and they come from reputable brands, Samsung and Kingston, so they are not Chinese refurbs.
I have 8gb in four 2gb modules and don't need more, but I thought the info would be interesting.

I had 4x4GB DDR2 800 also knew that I bought a test 1GB ECC DDR2 800 working on a Asus socket AM3 M4A785-M which each stick is comprised of 32 chips each using micron BGA ICs.

Then that M4A785-M died one day, just a finger snap, dead. Still have the parts except motherboard. I heard that 785 chipset was not that reliable. Oh well. I'll wait for another board but time had passed. I now have FM1 AMD computer working great and two i7-2600 and other choices that I can choose for XP use so need for old board using AMD CPU with DDR2 had passed.

Cheers,