Odd RAM Amounts in Pre-Builts

[SaurusX]

What's the deal with many of the Dells, Gateways, Acers, etc having strange RAM amounts? I see machines with 3, 6, and 10 GBs of RAM, but it seems to be extremely rare to ever see kits that total that at newegg. What's happening here?

 

[Lonyo]

They are mixing RAM sizes, e.g 4GB and 2GB.
6GB is a bigger number than 4GB, but cheaper than 8GB.

Just spec whoring most of the time.

 

[fralexandr]

there's also the off chance that 1 of the ram chips is soldered onto the motherboard and not user accessible, with the other being a standard so-dimm (common on netbooks).

 

[Gintaras]

What's the deal with many of the Dells, Gateways, Acers, etc having strange RAM amounts? I see machines with 3, 6, and 10 GBs of RAM, but it seems to be extremely rare to ever see kits that total that at newegg. What's happening here?

Nothing odd here...back in the days, many people had similar, it was pretty common - let's say, mobo had 2 ram slots and many people had, let's say: 1 slot - 128mb, 2nd slot 64mb sticks installed...

No one complained about...

Now people complain about NUMBERS, but prolly few(or most) will notice, that there's no difference between 3 or 4G...or...6 and 8....or: 8 and 10G

 

[Lonyo]

Nothing odd here...back in the days, many people had similar, it was pretty common - let's say, mobo had 2 ram slots and many people had, let's say: 1 slot - 128mb, 2nd slot 64mb sticks installed...

No one complained about...

Now people complain about NUMBERS, but prolly few(or most) will notice, that there's no difference between 3 or 4G...or...6 and 8....or: 8 and 10G

In the olden days, you didn't have dual channel RAM (with DIMMS, and you needed matching pairs for SIMMs anyway)

As you state though, there's minimal difference for most people between the amounts, since modern processors will run in dual channel the matching amounts (e..g 4GB stick + 8GB stick, the first 8GB is used and accessed in dual channel, with the remaining 4GB, from half of the 8GB stick, is single channel).

 

[JWade]

from the dells I have gotten that have had 6gb it has ben 2x2gb and 2x1gb ram in them. the 10gb is 2x4gb and 2x1gb. they can use up the smaller 1gb sticks of ram and say "hey look, this has more than 4gb, it has 6gb!!!". talking desktops.