Single vs. Dual Channel

Spire · Posted: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 01:36:15 Post Subject:

DUD3! is absolutly correct, there are two memory controllers on board. Usually one controller has one slot and the second has two slots. You can put memory in any slot. If you have 256 in slot one (on the first controller) and 512 in slot 2 and/or 3 only 256 of the total memory will be running in Dual Channel. For the greatest benefit, make sure the total anount of memory on both channels is the same.

A 512 in slot one and 2x 256 in slot 2 and 3 would be 1 gig all running Dual Channel. The slots are usually color coded different for each controller.

znoopy1234 · Rated PG Joined: 26 Aug 2003 Posts: 19 Location: Toronto

Thanks for the clarification,

As for my motherboard, I should be buying a P4C 800 or 800-E. To my knowledge, this should be able to run dual-chan Smile

. Originally, I was looking at the IC7 (cheaper), but ppl have convinced me that the P4C is better for overclocking.

garnold · Rated PG-13 Joined: 14 Apr 2003 Posts: 33

I have a Abit IS7 MB running 2 sticks of 512mb Geil Dual Channel Ultra 433 DDR-SDRAM PC3500 memory. To be honest I'm still learning about how to set all these toys up Laughing

One thing I did read is that if you plan to run XP you want at least 512 of RAM. I run the apps your talking about and have the full gig. It's not that much more money and totaly worht it.

knight0334 · Posted: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 09:12:46 Post Subject:

Dual channel has two seperate 64bit data paths vs. single channel which only has one. You can transfer twice the amount of data in a given time frame.

DDR RAM sends data on the rise and fall of the clockcycle, where is SDR RAM sends only on the fall(or rise) of the cycle.

When refering to the Opteron memory bus, it has a SINGLE channel memory bus. ...But it is 128/144(ECC)bits wide. Same theoretical bandwidth as a dual channel, but it isn't truely dual-just one big fat pipe.