DDR In Dual Channel - Is there supposed to be a Difference?

[elomeaty1]

i originally had 512mb of muschin pc-3200 (1 dimm) installed in my pc. once i had the cash, i bought another 512mb stick of the exact same ram. on my DFI NFII Ultra Inifinity board, the first two dimm slots are channel 1, and the last dimm that is alittle ofset is channel 2.

when i boot my pc up, the 1gb of memory is there, and it says "DDR Dual Channel is Enabled"

with 512mb, sandra would show my ram at about 3gb/sec

with 1gb in dual channel, it is exactly the same, 3gb/sec

does sandra not utilize the dual channel, because it does say only 512mb was used for the test.

Thanks guys!

Luke M.

 

[Ionizer86]

The difference exists, but on an AMD system, it's a pretty small difference (around 3-5% of performance), so the greater benefit would be the quantity of ram that you're getting.

 

[elomeaty1]

that just plain sucks...

 

[someone16]

I think that dual channel is getting overhyped...even on a P4 system it's not gonna make the computer from sluggish to total lagless.

Anyways the extra 512 will be good running games and alt tabbing.

 

[jagec]

it DOES make a pretty big difference on a P4 system in terms of data transfer rate...however, many computer-related tasks aren't bottlenecked by RAM speed. A faster hard drive MIGHT give you a bigger performance boost, depending on what you're doing.

 

[elomeaty1]

yeah, your probably right.

i don't have any performance issues with my pc, i was just hoping for the sake of numbers to see my ram bandwidth increase.

my hard drive is a WD SATA 80gb 7200rpm with 8mb cache. sandra says the drives runs at 49mb/sec. that good enought for me!

 

[Regs]

The Athlon's FSB does not use or take up the extra bandwidth. So therefore it's not really there to be used. Dead traffic.

Why does it suck? Th p4 800 Mhz wastes a lot of clock cycles over the bus which is why it needs the extra bandwidth. AMD cpu's have shorter pipelines so they do more work per cycle than the P4's.

 

[Jeff7]

Since I've not seen it mentioned here (though it is in just about all other threads concerning this matter), I'll say it:
Dual Channel's benefit for AMD systems is mainly seen with the nForce2's Integrated Graphics Processor (I think that's what IGP stands for) chipset. When enabled, the onboard graphics processor gets its own channel to access the RAM, which will yield far greater speed increases, as opposed to the SPP chipset, which has no graphics. Then the improvement may only be around 5%.

 

[deathwalker]

I'm convinced the benifits of Dual Channel memory have been way overblown. Most of the data I have seen from these "techy" sites tells me that unless you are using some type of monitoring software the average individual would almost never be able to tell the differance between running single channel or dual channel and I am in aggrement that quantity gives you greater benifit. The only statistics I have seen that clearly demonstrate a recognizalbe difference is if you are using the integrated graphics on a Nforce chipset mobo. It does appear that in that configuration there is a "real" gain in performance...also..the disadvantage from my view point of running dual channel is that if you are currently running dual channel and want to increase your system memory you either have a very tickleish situation of adding memory to the 3rd and sometimes 4th slot which increases latency and could make your memory less stable...or you have to remove perfectly good memory and replace it all with larger capacity sticks....crud...this crap is all so confusing.

 

[Kuznetsov]

well you cant feel the difference becoz you dont utilize application that takes advantage of the increased bandwidth.