Correct placement of 2 memory DIMMs on Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master.

[NDRE28]

Hello! 
I own a Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master (rev. 1.0) motherboard. 
I have 2 DDR4-2666 memory modules of 16GB each (no XMP enabled).
I inserted my memory modules in slots: 1+3 (A1+B1). 
Everything works great! 
Recently I’ve been taught that the correct placement of 2 memory modules is into slots: 2+4 (A2+B2) because of some signal reflections or so...

My question is this: Is there any truth to that?
And if so, why does my mobo manual say nothing about it?

[TVwazhere]

-Moved to CPU, Motherboards and Memory-

[Touch My Hamm]

The manual says to use either A1/B1 or A2/B2 if both are recommended by the manufacturer I cannot imagine a big performance increase by simply using the other channels. I say your safe using either, usually the ones furthest away from the socket are used first, that would be A2/B2.

 

[NDRE28]

5 minutes ago, GodSeph said:

The manual says to use either A1/B1 or A2/B2 if both are recommended by the manufacturer I cannot imagine a big performance increase by simply using the other channels. I say your safe using either, usually the ones furthest away from the socket are used first, that would be A2/B2.

 

So, with other words you also say that A2+B2 is preferred over A1+B1?

Should I move my DIMMs in that order?

[Touch My Hamm]

Unless the manufacturer specify channels to use then yes. In this case both look to work fine. You can confirm 100% with Gigabyte support but most likely the answer would be the same. Since both are allowed they should both work just fine. A2/B2 is is on top if you could that as an order but I don't think it will give u "extra" performance. I usually try to use the farther away slots as it allows more clearance for tower coolers if you have ram with large heat-spreaders. 

[NDRE28]

9 minutes ago, GodSeph said:

Unless the manufacturer specify channels to use then yes. In this case both look to work fine. You can confirm 100% with Gigabyte support but most likely the answer would be the same. Since both are allowed they should both work just fine. A2/B2 is is on top if you could that as an order but I don't think it will give u "extra" performance. I usually try to use the farther away slots as it allows more clearance for tower coolers if you have ram with large heat-spreaders. 

Yeah! 

Your answer is pretty much what I also believed before: 

that both configurations (A1+B1) or (A2+B2) are the same thing. 

 

But some insist that A2+B2 is “the correct position”.

Anyway, if I’m moving my DIMMs according to their advise, I can’t go wrong, right?

[NDRE28]

So, I moved my DIMMs from slots 1+3 (A1+B1) to slots 2+4 (A2+B2). 

 

I benchmarked my PC using: 

Geekbench 4.3.3, Cinebench R15, Cinebench R20, FutureMark MemTest, CPU-Z 1.9, and Windows 10 rating command “winsat formal” in Command Prompt. 

 

AND THE RESULT IS...

THE SAME! 

 

No gain and no loss in performance. 

[Falkentyne]

3 hours ago, NDRE said:

So, I moved my DIMMs from slots 1+3 (A1+B1) to slots 2+4 (A2+B2). 

 

I benchmarked my PC using: 

Geekbench 4.3.3, Cinebench R15, Cinebench R20, FutureMark MemTest, CPU-Z 1.9, and Windows 10 rating command “winsat formal” in Command Prompt. 

 

AND THE RESULT IS...

THE SAME! 

 

No gain and no loss in performance. 

Why would there a be a gain or loss of performance?  That would never happen anyway.

The only issue is if you would have stability problems or be able to overclock the RAM/timings to a higher limit in A2/B2 vs A1/B1, and no one here touched that topic, like 3200->3866 max barely stable A2/B2 versus 3200-3600 max barely stable A1/B1.  Considering how Klingon Pain Sticks is funner than multi-day RAM stability testing, I doubt anyone here has even bothered testing such a thing.

 

That being said I think only daisy chain boards would benefit from different bank positions when using two dimms.

 

[NDRE28]

On 11/14/2019 at 11:26 PM, Falkentyne said:

Why would there a be a gain or loss of performance?  That would never happen anyway.

The only issue is if you would have stability problems or be able to overclock the RAM/timings to a higher limit in A2/B2 vs A1/B1, and no one here touched that topic, like 3200->3866 max barely stable A2/B2 versus 3200-3600 max barely stable A1/B1.  Considering how Klingon Pain Sticks is funner than multi-day RAM stability testing, I doubt anyone here has even bothered testing such a thing.

 

That being said I think only daisy chain boards would benefit from different bank positions when using two dimms.

 

Well, in my case, I can’t talk about instability or overclock, because my modules are plug-n-play types @2666MT/s.