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Do memory sticks need to be identical to run in dual-channel mode?

S

SickBeast

Lifer
I'm just curious...I'm buying an nforce2 motherboard and I'm wondering if I should buy a pair of 512mb sticks right now, or just a single stick and then upgrade later. Could I have 1 stick of samsung and 1 stick of corsair, for example?
 
As long as they are the same size & density, it should be fine.

Your speed will be limited to the slower of the two sticks, of course.

Personally I would use matched sticks, but that doesn't mean you need to purchase them at the same time.

Viper GTS
 
cool...thanks very much.

the problem with getting matched sticks is that here in canada it's impossible to buy brand-name memory...so i always end up with the generic stuff...sometimes i get lucky and get a stick of samsung tho.
 
Wow, Canadians can't buy brand name memory? So all those people are using fraudulent knockoffs?

http://www.ncix.com

Incidentally, as I've finally learned, nforce2 boards don't necessarily need matched modules. As long as each channel has the same amount of memory the performance will be at peak, so one channel could have a 512MB module and the other channel have 2 modules of 256MB, so each channel has 512MB total. They will all run at the speed and timings of the slowest module though.

Don't know about dual-channel on P4 chipsets yet.
 
Be very careful in mixing and matching. Intel's new Dual-DDR chipset is very specific about the DIMMs having the same amount of memory, density of memory, "sidedness", etc. If all those things don't match, it switches both DIMMs to single-channel mode.

About the only thing you can mix up on them is speed, in which case it defaults to the slower of the two DIMMs for both channels.

The nForce2 may have similar requirements, though I don't particularly recall. In fact, your system will still run with mismatched sticks, and the OS will report the full amount of memory, but you just may not be aware it's doing it in single-channel mode. To play it safe, you're better off getting two completely identical sticks. If you're not sure, RTFM. 😉
 
The nforce2 can run with mismatched sticks, though of course at the lowest speed. It uses dual memory controllers that can address each channel separately, rather than the single controller of an Intel chipset which has to have matched channels. The only issue is that it will run in dual channel only up the size of the smaller channel, so if you have 256MB in one channel, and 512MB in the other, only the first 256MB in each will be dual-channel speeds, and the extra 256MB in one channel will use single channel speeds. As long as the total amount of memory per channel is the same, it's not an issue, and most boards have 2 slots in the first channel, and one slot for the second.
 
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