Dual Channel RAM

[FreshFish]

I am about to put together a Shuttle system in the next week or two and I still need to buy RAM for it. I seem to remember hearing, first of all, that A64's don't necessarily get a huge performance boost from running in dual channel. Also, I will only have a total of 2 slots in the Shuttle to work with. I want to be prepared for when games decide to chew up and spit out 1 gig of RAM, so I want to get 2x1024 sticks....the problem is that I don't want to spend the money yet. I want to buy one stick now and one later...but I don't know if I can still benefit from Dual Channel if the sticks aren't *matched*

Thanks for any help

 

[Valkerie]

get Corsair XMS (TWINX 3200)

These are dual channel, check Corsair website to make sure, however.

 

[Hacp]

They just have to have similar stock timings. So if you pair a coarsair 1gb with a kingston 1gb and they both have 2.5/3/3/6 timings stock, that means that they will run fine in dual channel. At least thats what I heard from teh web.

 

[theMan]

you will get up to a 6% performance increase at the most. what you could do, is pick up one 1gb stick, and then a few months later, just get another when you have the money.

 

[Blain]

Better to grab your memory now, before prices creep up any more. :roll:

 

[Noriaki]

Originally posted by: FreshFish
I seem to remember hearing, first of all, that A64's don't necessarily get a huge performance boost from running in dual channel.

Socket A Athlons didn't gain a great deal by running in Dual Channel. Athlon64s tend to gain a reasonable amount, somewhere in the 5-10% range. Not the end of the world if you don't get it, but certainly worthwhile.

 

[allanon1965]

my A64 3000 saw a definite improvement in performance when i went to dual channel ram, so I say its worth it for sure