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Two 512mb or 4 256mb for RAM

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Dragula22

Member
Hey, I was wondering which is better in the end.

I wanted 1 gb of ram in the next few months but I dont really want to spend money now.
I have a 128 now which i cant use at all so im going to at least get two 256 for now. And get another two later.

But is it better to just get two 512 now?

Thanks
 
get 2 512's. in the end, you'll have more room for upgrades, which i'm sure u will need as new games come out in a couple yrs that require a lot of ram.
 
Why not get one 512 now and one later? That'd be the best solution. Do you have a board that doesn't work without dual channel?
 
Hey thanks for the replies. Well I heard two 256 is better than 1 512. But like Im not sure if Im gona need the extra 512 meg. If the games I run are choppy, then ill consider it but I dont really want to shoot high in the beginning. Plus, i guess if i buy 2 512, ill have room for the future. But im really really not a hardcore gamer. I havent gamed for like 3 years cuz i was poor. But now im making a small amount of money and the new games seem to be buzzing so my thought is, why not try it out. ITS NOT: omg doom 3, i must play that with the highest detail. So im really thinking im gona need 1 gig of ram at most in the future. So with that in mind, i have four slots. If im absoltuely gona use a max of 1 gig, is it better to use 4 256 or 2 512 or it doesnt matter. What do you guys think?
 
What motherboard will you be using? Also, how's you're power supply and what else is in the system? DIMMs do draw power, up to an absolute maximum of 15W each for a double-sided DDR DIMM (according to Micron's specsheets), although we hope they are not pulling that kind of wattage on a sustained basis :Q
 
Ill be using these in the dell 400sc, which has a high grade 250W power supply and i think a pretty good mobo i heard. Something like the 875 chipset comes to mind but I really do not know about motherboards.
 
Since it uses a dual-channel-DDR chipset and a processor that will benefit significantly from the added bandwidth of dual-channel, you would be giving up some performance if you did start with just one memory module, until you got the second one in there. I'm not sure Dell will support it if you add your own memory modules, so keep that in mind...

Anyway, for that chipset there might even be a slight performance benefit to using four 256's but one way or the other, you will want dual-channel working for maximum system performance. Start with a pair of 256's if that's what you've got the money for and you want good performance right out of the box.
 
Well some while ago I downloaded Doom 3, a beta of course, I tried to play It in my rig (512MB...) and didn't work, neither in a 1GB Rig.....So how many MB's will we Need??....oopss, I think my budget won't be enough.
 
I would get the one 512 for now if that is all you can do, and then add on later and take advantage of the dual channel. Since you mentioned your not a huge gamer, the one stick will suffice for your general application needs and many games. Then add on when you can. The dual channel gain will be there waiting for you.
 
A lot depends on your motherboard. Mine has 3 DIMM slots, but you can only use two of them at a time. So, for a gig, two 512s are the only way it can be done. (ASUS P4E) That's what I have and it works well.
 
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