Question about RAM

**Mcstrange** · 04-23-10, 10:23 AM

Phyre; I dont know how much any of that is right.
First off I have never heard filling all your memory banks will bring better performance, in fact I would go so far as to bet that everything else being equal filling all your banks will be slower vs just using a single bigger stick, BUT any difference is likely so small as to be basically unmeasurable to humans.
And you do NOT have to have 2 sticks of dual channel memory, the motherboard will figure it out if you put in a single and will flip back to (or it can be done manually in the bios) single channel mode. And while there is a measurable difference between dual and single channel its a very minor difference, usually in the low single digit Frames Per Second in games.

I do love Corsair, and have become a GSkill fan, but I have not had good luck with Kingston and have read enough negative about them to avoid the brand.

Kanati; its alright, I have overheard the boozo at best buys telling someone something like that awhile back, it seems to be a semi-widespread misconception.

**WileECyte** · 04-23-10, 11:19 AM

You get the benefits of multi-channel by placing a DIMM in each channel. You will get lower performance (10-25% depending on the chipset) if you take a single 4G stick vs two 2G sticks. That being said, some chipsets will actually perform SLOWER if you use all available slots (Some AMD chipsets, will run 1 DIMM per channel at 1066 and 2 DIMMS per channel at 800 for example.)

**Phyrelight** · 04-23-10, 11:20 AM

Originally Posted by Mcstrange

Phyre; I dont know how much any of that is right.
First off I have never heard filling all your memory banks will bring better performance, in fact I would go so far as to bet that everything else being equal filling all your banks will be slower vs just using a single bigger stick, BUT any difference is likely so small as to be basically unmeasurable to humans.
And you do NOT have to have 2 sticks of dual channel memory, the motherboard will figure it out if you put in a single and will flip back to (or it can be done manually in the bios) single channel mode. And while there is a measurable difference between dual and single channel its a very minor difference, usually in the low single digit Frames Per Second in games.

I do love Corsair, and have become a GSkill fan, but I have not had good luck with Kingston and have read enough negative about them to avoid the brand.

Kanati; its alright, I have overheard the boozo at best buys telling someone something like that awhile back, it seems to be a semi-widespread misconception.

We actually covered the battle between spreading memory out or going for larger dimms and using less banks in my CSE classes. We had to write drivers for the hardware and part of the assignment was to determine the most efficient as well as the fastest design. During those tests it was found that splitting the memory across 4 banks enabled the hardware to split the work across 2 sets (channels) of memory. (for my example say slot 0 and 2 as pair 1 and slot 1 and 2 as pair 2) when we sent instructions across the bus to the memory to be processed by the CPU it was faster (about 10%) to use 4 dimms than 2. Each channel is separate and can do the work when the other is busy. With one channel (2 dimms) it has to wait for the previous instruction to finish before it can process the next. That is determined by the latency. So 2 1G dimms for 2G of system memory is limited to how fast that 2G can run (think front side bus). If you have 4 512mb dimms instead you now have 2 channels of 1G each instead of i channel of 2G. each time information is fetched from the HD it fills the memory and then the bus writes the memory into the processor. This is a simplified version, it's actually much more complex when you take dual channel into account that can read/write in both directions etc and now with triple channel. Like I said before, with today's low latency memory and higher front side bus speeds it's less of an issue then it was. The performance gain (slight) is often not worth the cost of having to upgrade all the dims later. Memory is cheaper and faster now.

**HungerForce** · 04-24-10, 03:41 AM

You'll have to excuse me for my newbie-ness, but I do not know the type of Mother Board it is. I believe it to be a AMD of some sort, but I don't know for certain. I bought this computer used from a Local LAN center when it shut down, because I needed a gaming computer, and their computers were pretty powerful. I've had it for a year or more...

From what I can tell, it has 4 slots for RAM, and I currently have 2 1gb sticks in there. I was thinking of just straight up replacing them with 2gb Ram sticks, but I wanted to get some advice first. I have no idea how old the sticks are, or if they're burning out... But I figure it might help with a small problem I get when I join games. I sometimes take a long time to load maps on pretty much all online games, and then have this rather annoying "stutter" at the beginning of the map for about 10 seconds or so. Sound is just repeating over and over, and I'm visually frozen until the stutter stops.

And so far you guys are more or less in agreement about G-Skill being one of the better brands. I'll check them out, and then go with another company and see how things go.

**Ruukil** · 04-24-10, 08:43 AM

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

DL and 'verify' your pc. Post the link and it'll help bigtime.

**Phyrelight** · 04-24-10, 09:34 AM

you can also open the case and there should be a sticker/label on the mother board that says a model # but the software approach that ruukil mentions will give much more detail.

**619summon** · 04-24-10, 01:08 PM

My 2 isk.

check your mobo/Os specs. if its dual channel thats the mode youll want to run. this means only two stix. you cant run dual channel with 4 stix. The only thing I thing running four stix would be dual channel is seer capacity.

There tons of infomation on the net about dual channel vs single channel adressing.

..k you have a spoon moving sugar from a pile to your coffee. you can use one spoon easy, but if you use two hands(dual channel) you can move twice as much. Now if there is four spoons on the table with two arms you only able to use 1 or two at a time. having more spoons is not faster nor slower its only allows you to cue more sugar for you to move.

**DaKillerFox** · 04-26-10, 03:59 PM

Originally Posted by Mcstrange

That is not the way it works Kanati. It is the Motherboards support for Dual, or Tripple channel Ram, not the type of ram. You can have a Signle Double or Tripple Channel motherboard for either DDR2 or DDR3, though I dont think I have seen a DDR2 triple channel board.

Not to nitpick this, but... That is not entirely true of the way it works with Triple Channel Memory. Starting with the new line of i-core processors from Intel, the Memory manager module is now directly built on the CPU itself, so the motherboard is no longer managing the memory fetching and feeding it to the CPU like with previous generations of CPU's. Instead, it is the CPU that is managing and deciding how best to use the memory banks on the motherboard and using dual or triple channel memory. So technically, you still need a motherboard that supports triple channel memory for the new i3, i5, and i7 processors, but it is actually a feature of the processor now, which means you are technically correct.

**DaKillerFox** · 04-26-10, 04:02 PM

Originally Posted by Phyrelight

Originally Posted by Mcstrange

Phyre; I dont know how much any of that is right.
First off I have never heard filling all your memory banks will bring better performance, in fact I would go so far as to bet that everything else being equal filling all your banks will be slower vs just using a single bigger stick, BUT any difference is likely so small as to be basically unmeasurable to humans.
And you do NOT have to have 2 sticks of dual channel memory, the motherboard will figure it out if you put in a single and will flip back to (or it can be done manually in the bios) single channel mode. And while there is a measurable difference between dual and single channel its a very minor difference, usually in the low single digit Frames Per Second in games.

I do love Corsair, and have become a GSkill fan, but I have not had good luck with Kingston and have read enough negative about them to avoid the brand.

Kanati; its alright, I have overheard the boozo at best buys telling someone something like that awhile back, it seems to be a semi-widespread misconception.

We actually covered the battle between spreading memory out or going for larger dimms and using less banks in my CSE classes. We had to write drivers for the hardware and part of the assignment was to determine the most efficient as well as the fastest design. During those tests it was found that splitting the memory across 4 banks enabled the hardware to split the work across 2 sets (channels) of memory. (for my example say slot 0 and 2 as pair 1 and slot 1 and 2 as pair 2) when we sent instructions across the bus to the memory to be processed by the CPU it was faster (about 10%) to use 4 dimms than 2. Each channel is separate and can do the work when the other is busy. With one channel (2 dimms) it has to wait for the previous instruction to finish before it can process the next. That is determined by the latency. So 2 1G dimms for 2G of system memory is limited to how fast that 2G can run (think front side bus). If you have 4 512mb dimms instead you now have 2 channels of 1G each instead of i channel of 2G. each time information is fetched from the HD it fills the memory and then the bus writes the memory into the processor. This is a simplified version, it's actually much more complex when you take dual channel into account that can read/write in both directions etc and now with triple channel. Like I said before, with today's low latency memory and higher front side bus speeds it's less of an issue then it was. The performance gain (slight) is often not worth the cost of having to upgrade all the dims later. Memory is cheaper and faster now.

Yeah, what he said... This is true for why Dual Channel was so impressive in the first place. This is part of the theory behind DDR, which is doube data rate RAM, where the off-clock cycles of the memory modules are utilized to speed up memory functions. Which is also what is happening here, where the off cycles of the access to each channel of memory allows the processor to access the other channel of memory, making it slightly faster to complete tasks. While dual channel will never be "twice" as fast as single channel, there is a percentage gain that I think is significant when you're talking 10-20% improvement in speed.