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Solve : Is 2.5 GB in Single Channel Better than 2 GB in Dual Channel?

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Hi,

Windows seems to recognize only 2.5 GB of ram, and I have 2 1GB sticks, and 2 512 MB sticks. My Motherboard has 2 pairs of ram slots for dual channel ram.

Orignally I put all 3 GB of ram in there, but KEPT getting random freezes while gaming - so I took out 1 stick of ram so the ram is exactly 2.5GB of ram, and it's been BETTER with lesser freezes.

Now my question is is 2.5GB of ram in single channel better than 2 GB in Dual? When playing the game of choice, Call of Duty 4, the RAM consumption is about 1.6-1.7 GB checked using Task Manager. So would it matter real time performance wise if I simply had 2 GB of dual channel ram? I think it will be better as Dual Channel is faster than single channel.

Thanks & God BlessSounds like you may have some faulty RAM or RAM slots.
Download and run Memtest overnight on each stick of RAM individually, if you find any errors that stick is bad. If they all test bad, suspect the slot.
As for your original question, more RAM is better than less in dual channel.Quote from: Calum on September 02, 2008, 03:23:27 AM

Sounds like you may have some faulty RAM or RAM slots.
Download and run Memtest overnight on each stick of RAM individually, if you find any errors that stick is bad. If they all test bad, suspect the slot.
As for your original question, more RAM is better than less in dual channel.

I did - memtest ran MULTIPLE tests with no errors.

Could you explain why more ram is better than dual? My reasoning is whenever I check ram usage while gaming, for different games, it's around 15xx/50xx - Always less than 2 GB, and I have 2x 1 GB sticks to use in dual channel mode - I'm assuming this will make the real time usage faster, compared to an average faster time with 2.5 GB in non dual channel ram.

Thanks & God Bless

Dual channel is not really much faster than single channel.
See this article for some benchmarks.
Sure, there is a slight improvement, but you're talking about having more RAM in single channel than dual. In memory intensive APPLICATIONS, such as decompressing files, they'll be about equal, but in most other apps, including games and general Windows usage, more RAM will be superior.
And yes, your RAM usage will be less than your total RAM, because if all the RAM was used you'd have serious problems. More RAM means that more files can be moved into the RAM rather than the paging file, increasing performance.
To be honest, you won't notice that much of a difference wither way, but I would favour more RAM myself.
Why not have the 1GB sticks running in dual channel anyway, with the 512MB on another channel? Then you can still get the best of both.Quote from: Calum on September 03, 2008, 03:27:28 AM
Dual channel is not really much faster than single channel.
See this article for some benchmarks.
Sure, there is a slight improvement, but you're talking about having more RAM in single channel than dual. In memory intensive applications, such as decompressing files, they'll be about equal, but in most other apps, including games and general Windows usage, more RAM will be superior.
And yes, your RAM usage will be less than your total RAM, because if all the RAM was used you'd have serious problems. More RAM means that more files can be moved into the RAM rather than the paging file, increasing performance.
To be honest, you won't notice that much of a difference wither way, but I would favour more RAM myself.
Why not have the 1GB sticks running in dual channel anyway, with the 512MB on another channel? Then you can still get the best of both.

Thanks for the reply, and the link to the article.

I had the ram setup as 2x1 GB and the 512MB, but it can only use that setup in single channel mode - when I start it up, the BIOS screen says single or dual channel. When I took out the extra 512 stick, it went back to Dual Channel mode.

The article was helpful in showing the performance differences between dual vs single (not much at all) - thank you very much indeed!

God Bless '_^OK, some motherboards can run in "flex" mode and run in dual channel with different amounts of RAM etc, and some can't.
Just wanted to eliminate the possibility.
Anyway, happy to help, and if you have any more questions feel free to post back.


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