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Going Dual Channel: Will I see any real life benefits?

M

Marty502

Senior member
Here's the drill: As you can see from my signature, I'm running 3 sticks of memory on my computer, so I'm without Dual Channel by now. Either 2 sticks or 4 sticks. It's an old system, I know.

The thing is, I could buy an identical 1 GB of RAM and enable DC, but will I see any real, tangible improvements? I don't care about Everest, 3DMark2006, SuperPi or whatever the lastest benchmarks are. I mostly play racing simulators (GTR2, LFS, rFactor) that hardly put any strain on this ancient system, and some other sports games.

However, I also enjoy from time to time some 'heavier' games like Bioshock, Oblivion, and recently some Crysis, and boy I'm CPU limited in those. Badly. I can crank the resolution and I swear it's almost the same as 640x480. Dunno if extra memory bandwidth could turn into some extra FPS too? I tried to find some benchmarks on this but I got nothing.

I also watch tons of movies, and keep encoding stuff for my MP4, all of this hopefully in an efficient way.

Now keep in mind that my budget is very tight. I can't really just spend 50 bucks on a stick and hope it does something good. Plus it's value DDR1 RAM, can you think of something harder to re-sell? 🙂

So... Do you guys think it's worth to buy the 1GB stick and ditch the 2x512 sticks for me? I honestly think it isn't, but I'm not really that savvy and I don't know how newer games react to memory bandwidth. Back in the day it was near worthless I think.

Thanks in advance!
 
Not gonna do anything. You're looking at a <5% gain MAX. Probably in the 1-2% range. Modern processors just don't use memory bandwidth efficiently (in terms of maxing it out)- so they're not starving for more. You might be able to give the memory you have some more voltage, and if the board allows- go for a cas of 2.5. Right there- that'd give you more performance gain. Dual-channel aside- more memory should give good returns; diminishing, but good returns.
 
Thought so. My signature was a bit old though - I have my RAM on CAS 2.5 already, plus some other mildly tight timings. Too bad it can't do 2T, but I'm not missing much really. 2T on a 939 system isn't the abomination some people suggest on forums, not on my experience at least.

Money better spent on a nice 939 dual core processor, right? Thanks for the input. 🙂
 
Heh, I know what you mean. And yeah, maybe with 'ancient' I went a bit too far. A Duron's ancient, this isn't. I'm very satisfied with my computer, but man it would be much, much better with a faster processor. I think I'll just buy a 3800 X2, overclock the living crap out of it and call it a day. Should be sweet in the near future with a new video card.
 
get a manchester core- not toledo. Unless you think the cache will help. Most of the x2's floating around all have 512vs 1mb of cache per core, so going manchester there I would say is a must. Manchesters don't have unactivated cache (like the 512 toldeos), so they will disperse heat better, and more evenly. Newegg has been posting 4200+ x2s (manchester core) for 80.

Then again, people are reporting hitting 2.7ghz on this toledo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16819103052

maybe my view on the cores is wrong now...
then again, people are reporting just as high on the 4200+, and at least you know you'll have that extra 200 mhz baseline (and a higher multiplier if I am not mistaken)
 
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