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Single Channel or Dual Channel Setup?

IceDigger

IceDigger

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I have 2x pc3200 geil ddr ram and an IS7-G motherboard.

Which would be better for me?

Use both sticks so they equal out 1GB ram or put them in dual channel mode so I only have 512MB?

I will not be buying any more ram for about a year.
 
Umm..I think you are a little confused about dual channel, if you have 2x512mb sticks of ram and you put them in dual channel you will still have 1g of ram. DC does not cut your ram in half heh.
 
you will have 1 gig of ram no matter what, the thing about DC is both sticks have to be the same type and brand of ram.
 
Actually, you just need to have the same speed ram in both channels and the same amount of ram in each channel
So you could have 2x256mb in one channel and a 512mb stick in another. Also, brand doesn't really matter, that just has to do with motherboard compatibility etc.
 
It is recommended to have the same brand and same speed for compatibility purposes, and same size as a requirement. I am running samsung ddr 2700 and geil ddr 3200 and they both play nicely in dual channel on my dfi 865pe board. Also, not to hijack the thread, but ever since I enabled dual channel, I could get lower timings for both ram than each individual ram stick. Also could clock higher, any explanation?
 
Originally posted by IceDigger
What are the advantages/disadvantages of it?
Click to expand...

The advantages of dual channel?

1.) More Bandwidth

Thats pretty much it. I can't really think of a disadvantage to running dual channel. In the majority of areas you wont see a benefit from increased bandwidth because bandwidth really is very important after a certain speed is met. 3.2GB/s is the normal single channel bandwidth from DDR400. If you ran dual channel it would effectively be 6.4GB/s.

The FX-51 and A64 3400+ are the same speed but the FX-51 is dual channel and the the 3400+ is single. There is no to very little performance difference in any benchmarks even though the FX-51 has nearly triple the amount of bandwidth. Timings are what are most important in performance but dual channel on Intel machines gives a good performance boost because of the fact the Pentium 4 can use more bandwidth effectively.
 
Here's a disadvantage...

1) You need to buy two sticks.

This may seem horribly obvious, but it's still a disadvantage. If you can only afford 512mb, you need to buy two 256mb sticks. If you had bought one 512mb stick, you could upgrade to a maximum of 2gb (4x512) without replacing any ram. However, since you bought two 256mb sticks, the most you could upgrade to without any waste would be 1.5gb (2x256, 2x512).

This may not be a huge disadvantage, but it is there.
 
The advantage is GREAT on a P4 system, but on an athlon system it's about a 5% increase in performance.

~Adam
 
If you have two sticks, run in DC - there are no real disadvantages if the sticks play nice.
 
Originally posted by RC7
Actually, you just need to have the same speed ram in both channels and the same amount of ram in each channel
So you could have 2x256mb in one channel and a 512mb stick in another. Also, brand doesn't really matter, that just has to do with motherboard compatibility etc.
Click to expand...

Notice, that he mentions it's an Intel board. Intel boards don't have the goofy odd numbered memory slot implemenation that AMD dual channel boards do.
 
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