Dual channel ram vs. single?

[trogdor]

I have 512mb pc3200 on my ABit nf7 nforceII board with an athlon 2500, and am considering getting another stick to run in dual channel mode.

What kind of benefits does this dual channel mode have? does it mean that the memory speed will be twice what it is now? Is it better to go with 1024mb in single channel mode than 512 in dual?

Do the two sticks have to be the exact same spec (512 pc3200) in order to run in dual mode?

 

[DAFFYDRUNK]

Sticks don't have to be exact the same, just similar spec so they can both run whatever settings you give them. Probably have to be the same size though. Never actually tried 2 different sizes to see what it did. I ran some overclockable PC2100 with a stick of PC2700 for months without isssue. Dual channel will improve the speed but it won't be significant. The only thing you'd really notice is memory benchmarks. Everything else might go up ~1%.

 

[Sangram]

Dual channel has no benefits at all that you can notice in everyday use. It also has additional latency. However some applications exhibit a bit better performance on Dual Channel - 3DSMax being one of them.

One place where I find Dual channel helping is when using some plugins. But not by much. Overall single channel feels a bit faster due to the reduced latency. On AMD systems, lower latency is always prefered and on Intel, higher bandwidth helps more.

On the Intel platform, Dual channel has more significant benefits as the processor is able to fully use the memeory bandwidth, being quad-pumped.

You need not handmatch sticks, but ideally the two sticks should be of the same size and speeds. Not that it wouldn't work, it would work at the slower of the speeds. e.g One stick of PC3200 and one stick of PC2700 will run at a max of 166MHz, and so on.

There are people who are using 1x512 in the single slot and 2x256 in the two slots, and able to run just fine.