Dual Channel?

ellanky

New Member
This is more of a 'just wondering' question but I remember reading that in order have dual channel you're supposed to have same RAM speed, size, timings, etc..

Thing is I just noticed yesterday that my laptop has 3GB of DDR2 RAM. CPU-Z says its memory is running in dual channel.

So does that mean you dont need the same RAM size in order to have the memory running in DC?
 

melloorr

New Member
It is not necessary to have the same RAM size, but it tends to work more efficiently if they are the same size. However, in dual channel, the voltage, latency and make should preferably be the same.
 

2048Megabytes

Active Member
3072 megabytes of RAM is plenty of memory. If you are having problems with system slowdowns it is not because of your DDR2 RAM. Also, all components on a computer run off direct current except for maybe the power supply unit.
 

Aastii

VIP Member
If you have 2 x 1GB + 2 x 512MB, that is in dual channel.

What it means by you need the same capacity is that in each set of paired memory, you have to have the same capacity, so if you moved the sticks around so you have (1GB + 512MB) + (1GB + 512MB) it would only show 2GB, as only 512MB of the 1GB sticks would be used so it could be used in dual channel. There is an exception though, which is if your motherboard supports flex mode, where it uses the extra memory, but in single channel rather than dual
 

Broni

VIP Member
Keep in mind, that any advantage of using dual channel RAM is probably overstated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-channel_architecture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom's_Hardware
Tom's Hardware found little significant difference between single-channel and dual-channel configurations in synthetic and gaming benchmarks (using a "modern" system setup). In its tests, dual channel gave at best a 5% speed increase in memory-intensive tasks.[3] Another comparison by laptoplogic.com resulted in a similar conclusion for integrated graphics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-channel_architecture#cite_note-3
 
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