Dual-Channel Memory "Real World" Performance

Ozkar · Post by **Ozkar** » Wed May 16, 2007 12:43 pm

Is there a noticeable difference between using single-channel memory and dual-channel memory in everyday tasks (internet, listening to music, watching videos, loading programs, etc)?

Max Slowik · Post by **Max Slowik** » Wed May 16, 2007 2:34 pm

Not likely. It's sometimes cheaper to buy two sticks of RAM in a set than it is to buy one bigger stick, though, in which case, I can't really imagine why not do it.

shunx · Post by **shunx** » Wed May 16, 2007 4:05 pm

It can sometimes make things slower:
http://www.overclockers.com/articles1361/

sjoukew · Post by **sjoukew** » Fri May 18, 2007 7:56 am

WinRar loves memory bandwidth. With half the memory bandwidth, I wouldn't be surprised if it also halves the winrar speed.

geforce1 · Post by **geforce1** » Fri May 18, 2007 8:52 am

Dual-channel really doesn't make much sense on an Athlon XP unless the memory is running at DDR200.

My quick take on what CPUs may get a worthy benefit from dual-channel as opposed to single-channel:
Any Socket 939 dual-core CPU (Athlon 64 X2, Opteron)
Any Socket AM2 dual-core CPU (if running less than DDR2-667)
Most Socket 478 CPUs (especially Celerons)
Some LGA775 CPUs w/ DDR2 (really fast P4s or Core 2 Duos/Quads)
Onboard video on motherboards may improve with memory running in dual-channel mode.

Ozkar · Post by **Ozkar** » Wed May 23, 2007 9:31 am

My computer has a pentium 4 3.0 GHZ processor and 512 MB of RAM. I was just wondering if adding another 512 MB in dual channel mode would increase the performance in average tasks, like surfing the web, listening to music, etc...

vanhelmont · Post by **vanhelmont** » Wed May 23, 2007 10:58 am

Everybody else talked about the advantages of dual channel, but 512 MB of ram isn't a lot in these days of multimedia. I think you will notice an improvement just due to the increase in ram, especially if you tend to have several programs going at once. Should be a worthwhile upgrade at today's ram prices.

=assassin= · Post by **=assassin=** » Wed May 23, 2007 11:39 am

Yeah, I would definately add more RAM if you have only 512mb - 1GB should make things feel better by itself, dual channel or not.

tehfire · Post by **tehfire** » Wed May 23, 2007 11:56 am

I've been using dual-channel configurations ever since the 865P chipset came out all those years ago. My thought was all things being equal, why not go for dual-channel? It can only help.

Anyways, just curious one day I booted up SuperPi (the most memory-intensive program I could think of) and tested it in single- and dual-channel configurations. There was less than a second difference between the two (can't remember the settings or actual times). Either SuperPi isn't as memory-intensive as I thought, or computers (on a Netburst, anyways) don't use that much bandwidth.

GentleGiant · Post by **GentleGiant** » Mon May 28, 2007 11:03 am

My results with Folding@Home on an AMD X2 gave a 15-25% drop in performance with a single 512MB versus two. It's likely SuperPi is not nearly as memory intensive as you think...

Fooling around with memory timings showed me they don't matter so much: going from the stock 200Mhz 2-2-2-5 timings to 166Mhz 2.5-3-3-7 to try to diagnose a motherboard problem, I saw performance dip by just 6%

(The F@H work units took up no more than between 25 and 130MB, and the system was otherwise idle, so 512MB should've be plenty to avoid paging. This was running two clients on a dual core chip. I averaged frame times over a 1-2 hour period)