Normal style ram on Dual channel board?

[otispunkmeyer]

i am lookin to buy a new mobo, an i have 1 question

i thinkin bout these 3

Abit NF7-M
Asus A7N8X-X
Gigabyte GA-7N400 L1

Abit and Asus are neck n neck really (less some one can prove otherwise)
but the gigabyte boards have dual channel memory support, but can i run it just as normal as in not dual channel?
just as if there were only 3 slots for DDR ram? and not 4 for dual channel?

 

[egale]

You can run any dual channel board as single channel. You really lose a lot of performance doing that though. If you run an odd number of sticks or the sticks you used do not match exactly, you will have to run single channel.

 

[Vette73]

Get rthe Shuttle MN31N and get 2 slabs of Ram that are the same and run it in dual Ch.

You will lost a great deal of performance if you use the onboard video and only run single Ch memory.

 

[beatle]

Keep in mind that your loss of performance will be in the onboard video ONLY. The rest of the system will still be nearly as snappy as a dual channel setup.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: beatle
Keep in mind that your loss of performance will be in the onboard video ONLY. The rest of the system will still be nearly as snappy as a dual channel setup.

Yeah, it's only like 200MB/sec difference, at least in my testing - 2800MB/sec up to 3000MB/sec in DC mode, approximate - read test in AIDA32.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: Marlin1975
Get rthe Shuttle MN31N and get 2 slabs of Ram that are the same and run it in dual Ch.

You will lost a great deal of performance if you use the onboard video and only run single Ch memory.

You will lose almost nothing in performance. Typical difference is 7% in bandwidth (ie 3000MB/s to 2800 MB/s). Single Channel is perfectly fine.

Edit: I think you're thinking of Canterwood, Marlin. On the Canterwood, dual channel basically gives you double the bandwidth. On the Nforce2, it's virtually nothing.