Dude! I made the biggest n00b mistake

[imported_lamer]

I'm such a newbie. On the postive side of things though: Computerz rule!!!

 

[DaFinn]

And this is bad... because? 😕
It makes no difference if you get "normal" or "dual channel" ram in your setup. If you wanted 2 sticks anyway, that just makes sure they work nice together...
If you move to a dual channel system later, you already have the memory.

 

[Mik3y]

ur a noob for not knowing that dual channel ram is just 2 sticks of ram. dual channel just means that the sticks have been tested and are able to run in dual channel. other then that, its nothing mroe then buying a stick of corsair and another stick of ocz and putting them together.

 

[imported_lamer]

okay cool. I'm gonna replace the processor and motherboard next year then

 

[imported_lamer]

Mik3y I still don't understand what dual chan is

 

[NarcoticHobo]

Think of it as a raid 0 for ram.

 

[imported_lamer]

okay thanks for clearing that up

cough*sarcasm*cough

 

[Viper96720]

Think of normal single channel as one lane of a road. Dual channel would be 2 laned road. More data can flow over the 2 lane road compared to a single lane road. The memory itself is not dual channel. It's the memory controller on the motherboard or CPU in the case of some Athlon 64's 940 and 939pin models that is.
All that a dual channel kit usually is just sticks from the same manufacturing batch.

 

[Megatomic]

Memory controllers are 64bit (usually). A dual channel system has two of them running concurrently rather than one. You *theoretically* get twice the bandwidth, but few systems actually use all that is available. Pentium 4 Northwood and later benefit the most from dual channel, s462 the least (so far). S939 usually gets about 5% better performance from dual channel (comparing s754 to s939 with CPUs running at the same frequency).