How do i know if im running dual channel?

[Choppedliver]

I have an FIC AU13. I thought i knew which slots were which, UNTIL I READ THE FREAKING PIECE OF CRAP MANUAL.

I have one slot labeled 1... all by itself

then the next slot is labeled 3. and it is side by side the next slot, labeled 2.

WTF?

I put two sticks of ram in 1, 3, and in 1, 2


I only then ran Sisoft Sandra, and I only got 100mb/s difference.

HELPPPP

 

[mechBgon]

Make sure that one of the two memory modules is in the "loner" slot that sits apart, and you're running dual-channel. Sandra reportedly shows larger differences in the unbuffered tests, but on a motherboard that doesn't have onboard video fighting for those DIMMs, you're not going to see a lot of performance difference in common applications. The glass is already about 95%-99% full with nForce2.

 

[ToxicWaste]

run cpuz, it will tell you...

cpuz

 

[Doh!]

If slot 1 is all by itself, & you've ran benchmarks with sticks in slots 1 & 2 and 1 & 3, both are dual channel.

 

[ForsakenMaster]

When you first boot your rig it will say either ddr performace timing single or dual channel.
Thats how you tell

 

[high]

^^ What he said

 

[Choppedliver]

my fic motherboard says niether of those. but apparently from what the other guys are saying, dual channel doesnt make a bit of difference unless you have integrated graphics.

so whats all the hoopla about 6.4gb/s bandwidth when i only can use 2.8 - 3 of it?

what a rip!

 

[Budman]

Originally posted by: ToxicWaste
run cpuz, it will tell you...

cpuz

Exactly CPU-Z will tell you.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Choppedliver
my fic motherboard says niether of those. but apparently from what the other guys are saying, dual channel doesnt make a bit of difference unless you have integrated graphics.

so whats all the hoopla about 6.4gb/s bandwidth when i only can use 2.8 - 3 of it?

what a rip!

What's the point of having a big Dodge pickup truck with a V10 engine if it's not towing a trailer all the time? What a rip!

They should make big Dodge pickups with little 4-cylinder engines for the people who won't be towing trailers. And short, 3-foot-long beds instead of those 8-foot beds. Heck, leave the bed off, extend the cab backwards and add some seats back there. Maybe they should even call it a "Caravan" just so no one's confused...


*adds another checkmark to the list of people who are mysteriously outraged that the nForce2 platform has an abundance of memory bandwidth*

 

[Choppedliver]

well the difference is, with a big engine, i can tow a trailer if i want.

With 6.5gb/s of bandwidth. I can NEVER use it all with an athlon xp processor.

Am i wrong?

 

[mechBgon]

You're right, in as far as that goes, but the CPU isn't the only thing in your system that needs to access the RAM. Look at the blue numbers on the chart on this page: dual-channel offers >50% boost in gaming performance of nForce2 with onboard video. Obviously onboard video is the king of the bandwidth hogs... but wait, you say... my board doesn't have that crummy lukewarm onboard video, so what's the point?

Well, take a look at the blue numbers in the chart on this page and you can see that in some specialized situations, the dual-channel feature still offers ~20% performance boosts, although probably not the stuff you do on a daily basis. The reason this happens is that, with all that excess bandwidth, the northbridge's memory controllers can afford to guess what the CPU will want next out of RAM, and pre-fetch it. If they guess wrong... no harm, no foul, because the excess bandwidth wasn't needed for anything else anyway. They toss the data and guess again.

The AthlonXPs already do their own data pre-fetching to some extent, so having the northbridge doing its own guessing on the side will usually not get you any further ahead, judging by the benchies there. But where it does pan out, it really makes a difference.

If you don't like having more bandwidth than the CPU can consume by itself, nVidia does have you covered... they make a single-channel nForce2 northbridge that you can find on boards without integrated video. Look for boards with the "nForce2 400" as opposed to the "nForce2 Ultra 400," such as the Asus A7N8X-X or the Shuttle AN35N non-Ultra.