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How important is matching dual channel memory sticks?

C

cubby1223

Lifer
The systems I get a hold of for local businesses or individuals usually ship with unmatched ram sticks. And I pull them out and put in matching ram sticks.

The systems use either intel's Q35 or Q45 chipset.

I need to cut expenses, and the question simply is, is this an expense I can cut? Have the chipsets improved since the earliest days of dual channel where reliability of unmatched ram sticks is no longer a concern?

Thanks
 
I don't think I have ever seen a site test it. Usually what people say is that the chips run at the worst settings found between the 2 sticks, so there is some degradation of performance. But even now if you run a modern CPU on just one channel its far from terrible, its not like it halves the performance of the CPU. I suspect, although have no data to really back it up, that the impact is pretty minimal and likely in the 0-2% range.
 
Performance I'm not concerned about. Having the system run free of errors is. There were a few times back with i865 or early nforce chipsets that I had systems have occasional glitches, reboots, due to unmatched ram. With the newer chipsets have those issues really been solved?
 
No not all of them. All depends how the bios handle the settings and without manual intervention they sometimes get it wrong. Things have improved but based on what I have seen in the last few chipsets its still not perfect, especially when doing odd things like putting unmatched dimms in. You should be able to set the manually to the lowest settings of course but that is going to require more faff than perhaps you want to do.
 
cubby1223 said:
Performance I'm not concerned about. Having the system run free of errors is. There were a few times back with i865 or early nforce chipsets that I had systems have occasional glitches, reboots, due to unmatched ram. With the newer chipsets have those issues really been solved?
Click to expand...

It has really always been a crapshoot.
 
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