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Dual Channel RAM?

T

thompy

Junior Member
I am building a small DB Server and I am looking at using the following setup

ASUS A7N8X
AMD XP2500 Barton
1 GIG of RAM
2X120GB Seatgate SATA HDD's in RAID 0
Lian Li Case (6070)
ANTEC Trueblue 480W PSU
LG 4020B DVD Writer

There will be 5-10 people accessing it concurrently. I want to look at getting a dual channel RAM kit and I'm not sure which is the best to buy. I know Corsair makes good RAM as well as Crucial but what about Mushkin or OCZ? Are the dual channel kits worth the extra coin?
Any and all info is greatly appreciated.
 
Dual-channel kits are just two modules that have been tested together so you have a near absolute guarantee that they'll work together. In fact Corsair uses the A7N8X to do the testing. I don't really know how deep a level of testing they do on them, given how long it would take to do real testing on each pair on an actual board, they may just plug them in and see if they boot.

Corsair's TwinX actually comes in cheaper than two individual modules sometimes. But if they're more expensive, it's not really worth any extra money unless you're looking to have that extra bit of guarantee and are able to not be concerned too much about cost. Mushkin of course is always good memory, just be careful of what they rate the module timings at for a particular frequency.

In truth, you really could do perfectly fine with just two modules of Crucial memory. It's unlikely you're really going to notice a screaming difference due to the more aggressive timings of other memory that can cost twice as much.
 
Thanks for the info. I think I will look at the crucial sugestion it's always nice to save a bit of cash. Maybe I can go with 1.5GB of crucial. Is cas latency important if I'm not going to overclock. I'm looking more from a stability standpoint.
 
It's not so important as to be worth doubling the price for most people. A few percentage points increase in performance in some applications. Stability isn't an issue as long as you're not attempting to set the timings lower than the module is rated for. Crucial is rated at 2.5-3-3-6, but does 2-3-3-6 quite easily even when slightly overclocked. If you get modules of another brand rated for 2-2-2-5 they'll be just as stable.

Keep in mind that if you go with 1.5GB in 3 modules, you lose the effectiveness of dual-channel to some degree. It shouldn't make a huge difference though, as dual-channel is only mildly useful for an Athlon system. 1GB of the memory will still be active as dual-channel too, only 512MB will be accessed as single channel. (The nForce2 controller will access the "common amount" of memory on each channel in dual-mode, and the excess on the one channel in single-channel mode.)
 
Do you think 1.5GB's is overkill? Is there a huge performance gain in going with PC3200 in a SQL database environment?
 
The performance of an Athlon system is best with memory speed matching the frontside bus. It can't use any of the bandwidth past that, and the timing issues from asynchronous operation can result in reduced performance. If you had integrated video or were using a video card that needed to use AGP memory a lot (which your system won't be of course) then the extra bandwidth can be used. Of course, with dual-channel memory, the bandwidth is already double what the CPU can use, so there's even less need to use a higher speed.

I don't know what the difference in performance would be with database usage, comparing more 1GB to 1.5GB, or more or less bandwidth. No idea whether fast memory access is important, or greater memory, or if CPU speed is primary.
 
Originally posted by: thompy
Thanks for the info. I think I will look at the crucial sugestion it's always nice to save a bit of cash. Maybe I can go with 1.5GB of crucial. Is cas latency important if I'm not going to overclock. I'm looking more from a stability standpoint.
Click to expand...

Disk speed is your priamry goal with a database. It's one of the only times RAID 0 is worthwhile, but I'd add some redundancy if the data is important. And get ANYTHING other than OCZ. Mushkin is fantastic, but very expensive.
 
I'm still debating on going with RAID 0 or RAID 1. The data is important and I would do RAID 5 but it's too much of a hit on performance and I can't afford to go with SCSI. That's why I am getting the DVD burner I was planning on differential backups up every half hour onto DVD RAM.
 
OCZ, Mushkin, Corsair, and Crucial are all good choices. If you're not going to overclock, I can't see a problem in any of these, to tell you the truth.

Anymore, the people who tell you to avoid OCZ are kinda misinformed. It's on par w/ some of the top tier companies nowdays, but unfortunately, it still has the OCZ name which used to be bad news. As far as I've heard the company is under new management, and reviews and user experiences can tell ya it's just fine.
 
Originally posted by: MistaTastyCakes
OCZ, Mushkin, Corsair, and Crucial are all good choices. If you're not going to overclock, I can't see a problem in any of these, to tell you the truth.

Anymore, the people who tell you to avoid OCZ are kinda misinformed. It's on par w/ some of the top tier companies nowdays, but unfortunately, it still has the OCZ name which used to be bad news. As far as I've heard the company is under new management, and reviews and user experiences can tell ya it's just fine.
Click to expand...

OCZ has a history of combining crap products with fraudulent business practices. Maybe they've changed, maybe they haven't. But why even take the risk when good memory from reputable companies is available for the same price?
 
I got mine cheaper than I coulda gotten Corsair, and it overclocks quite well. I'm not saying it's the best stuff ever or something, and all the top RAM choices these days are usually a great bet. All I'm saying is from what I've seen, OCZ is a good buy these days, and shouldn't totally be counted out when shopping for memory. 🙂

*Recently* I have seen no reason to avoid OCZ. As for their business practices in the past.. well, it's exactly that. The past 🙂

Hehe either way, whatever.. to each his own 🙂 Most any major brand name of RAM is a good buy anymore.
 
I think I'm going with Mushkin. As far as 4 channel RAID. I did a little research and found the highpoint 404 looks like a cool card. I could go with 4 80 GB WD's or something.
 
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