More Core i7 trichannel "failure" from "thiefs"

[Drwho?]

Are you absolutely sure? From various sources I've heard (and seen) that the difference in performance between dual and triple channel is close to nothing. Actually, I am not quite sure yet, because the extra channel should be adding much more bandwidth than the 500MB's I've seen (DDR3 @ 933MHz, exact same system settings). It's either Lavalys Everest that screws up, although I'm not likely to believe that, or something in the bios/motherboard design of the Intel reference motherboard is making the triple channel run at dual channel, which also would surprise me.

What are the possible underlying causes that make people report a lack of performance gain going from dual channel to triple channel? Software/hardware?

I always said that Core 2 Quad does not need much mem Bandwidth, so, on real application, if memory is not important, you will see very little from Mem Bandwidth.
In the mean time, on application like SETI, Rosetta, folding@home, you got to feed 8 threads, the bandwidth will come handy. If you do H264 with profile level 4, you ll go and see 16 frames in both directions, this will get handy too.

Just remember, to keep 8 threads happy, you ll need the bandwidth, it is just a matter of time before the software use it 100%.
I heard people telling me that nobody will use MMX, it was so hard to use ... Today, you can t boot most of the OS without it.

and yes, I am very sure that 3 Dimms goes faster than 2 Dimms. (on mem test) If it does not, the proto is broken