Dumb RAM question....

[RaistlinZ]

I keep hearing about Triple Channel ram. Does this mean if I were to build an i7 920 system that I would have to buy 3 sticks of 2G each? Or can I run say, 4 x 2G sticks for 8GB total and still get the benefit of triple channel?

I commonly see 6GB RAM sets being sold on Newegg but hardly ever any 8GB sets, so I was curious. Thanks.

 

[ScorcherDarkly]

You can use 4 GB of RAM on x58 but it won't run in triple channel mode. You need 3 or 6 sticks of RAM to run in triple channel, whether those sticks be 1, 2 or 4 GB each.

 

[n7]

You can use 4 GB of RAM on x58 but it won't run in triple channel mode. You need 3 or 6 sticks of RAM to run in triple channel, whether those sticks be 1, 2 or 4 GB each.

Actually, AFAIK, Intel still has Flex Mode for X58, so just like w/ previous platforms, you do get triple channel, just asyncronously.

Synthetic benchmarks will suffer slightly; real world usage is unlikely to be affected.

I do recommend getting 3 or 6 DIMMs for X58 obviously, but it's really not the end of the world if you don't...

 

[Denithor]

If you run two sticks they will both operate in dual channel mode.
If you run three sticks they will operate in triple channel mode.
If you run four sticks the first three will run triple channel and the fourth will run single channel mode (still higher bandwidth than two pairs in dual channel mode).

But unless you're running a web server hosting shitloads of IOPS you'll never see the difference among any of these setups.

Go read this article: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3448&p=5
Should clear things up for you.