Eight or six gigs?

C

clayman

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Oct 8, 2009
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I'm ordering parts for a new build ... I'm going with a GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R and ultimately want to go to 12 gigs. I can afford 8 gig's matched right now and pick up the other 4 in a couple of months. A couple of friends say I should not .... that I should go with a matched set of 6 now and the other 6 later? Stability?

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
 
It won't affect stability, but it's better to run in triple channel mode (3 memory sticks, one in every other slot) and it may be a little hard to do that with 8GBs, but for 6GBs it's obvious (3x2GBs).
 
Why do you need 12 in the first place? 6 is more then enough, especially DDR3 in triple channel.
 
devil22 said:
It won't affect stability, but it's better to run in triple channel mode (3 memory sticks, one in every other slot)
Click to expand...

This.

You would probably be best off just doing 6 now and another 6 later. That said, you may find 6 is enough by itself. It depends on your usage, but I found 6 to be plenty even with some VM work.
 
clayman said:
I'm ordering parts for a new build ... I'm going with a GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R and ultimately want to go to 12 gigs. I can afford 8 gig's matched right now and pick up the other 4 in a couple of months. A couple of friends say I should not .... that I should go with a matched set of 6 now and the other 6 later? Stability?

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

Performance. Going with 4 x 2GB (for a total of 8GB on an X58 motherboard) will force the i7's memory controller to run in an imbalanced triple-channel + single-channel mode, which significantly increases the total latency of the memory controller - which in turn will result in a slight decrease in overall system performance. Better to go with only 6GB (3 x 2GB) for now.
 
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