2 sticks or 4 sticks ?

I personally went with 16 sticks. ;)
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2 sticks if you OC for benches or plan on adding more in the future. 4 if you want to fill it up.
One of my systems had 2 sticks of Ram and 2 sticks of Light Enhancement ram, basically ram sticks with no ram on them.
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So does 2 sticks of ram work faster than 4 sticks of ram or even like you 16 sticks of ram ?
 
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Depend on platform and task obviously, ram type (for high speed sometime 2 stick kit achieve higher), for day to day or gaming I would minimal difference.


https://techguided.com/single-channel-vs-dual-channel-vs-quad-channel/
https://www.techspot.com/article/1971-more-ram-modules-better-for-gaming/

What gained if gained by going 4 stick can easily be lost if it mean lesser frequency/timing optimisation and you have the dual ranked DIMM modules versus single has well going on.

Thank you.
 
Totally system dependent here. Intel Alder Lake if you're OCing RAM 2 sticks is better, but on LGA 115X usually you could run 4 almost as fast as 2, aside from crazy OCs.

I like 4 for sure if I'm doing RGB to look at
 
I've always used two, primarily because using four doesn't give much of a boost in gaming performance. Also in some cases I haven't had a choice as pretty much mITX and even some mATX boards don't have four slots.
If you're doing memory intensive tasks like rendering, editing, etc. there's a more noticeable boost having four, but like Luke said they generally need to be matched when it comes to frequency and timings. And in my experience, it's generally more cost-effective to buy two higher-level sticks than four lower, except when individial sticks start reaching 32 GB or higher. There are exceptions to this though.
 
Just curious, how much total RAM did this have? It looks like a slightly older system but my, my, is that impressive.
128GB of DDR3. It was a Dual 8 core Xeon E5-2670 setup I bought from a member here back in the Summer of 2016. I put it into my old Corsair Air 540 and installed the Intel AIO's in November of 2016 when I bought the Air 740 for my main system.

It was a really tight fit too,
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One thing to keep in mind is that there are single-rank modules and dual-rank modules. If you only go with two sticks, then in most cases you want two dual-rank modules. If you go with 4 modules you can use single-rank or dual-rank modules. Using only two single-rank modules can cause a performance penalty. On the flip side, using 4 dual-rank modules can be harder on the memory controller, which isn't usually a problem, but can be especially if you are pushing your clocks.
 
I'm going to assume that we're talking about DDR4 and not DDR5. It doesn't make a big difference as long as you are running in dual-channel on a dual-channel platform or quad-channel on a quad-channel platform.

But, if you want to know what is ideal in terms of getting the last drop of performance, then you have to know your motherboard.

For daisy chain topology (and for boards with only 1 slot per channel), 1 dual-rank stick per memory channel is the best overall
For t-topology, 2 single-rank sticks per memory channel is the best overall.

Newer stuff like X570/Z590/Z690 is pretty much all daisy chain. Lower-end versions of those platforms (e.g. B550, B660, H670, etc) are also daisy chain. Somewhat older stuff can be either.

For DDR5, you definitely want to only run 2 sticks at the current time unless you really need the capacity.
 
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