Any performance disadvantage having 4 sticks of ram over 2?

My machine came with 12GB ram made up of 2x2GB and 2x4GB. Apart from the obvious advantage of upping to 16GB, is there any advantage to having just two sticks of ram in there rather than the 4 it has now? This may be the dumbest question ever, but I honestly have no idea

 

Don't quote me on this but I think its better to have 4x4GB sticks to make up 16GB rather then 2x8GB so the load is spread more even across more sources... Or something like that. Either way thats enough RAM for general use and the average user won't see too much of an increase.

 

When I was in school, I was taught this: Four DIMMS would cause more strain on the memory controller and motherboard chipset. It would take slightly longer for the CPU to add and retrieve data from four DIMMS as opposed to two.

Nowadays, with the better memory management functions of the IVB PCH, 4x4GB has been proven to have slightly better timing than 2x8GB. Not sure about your setup since not all the DIMMS are symmetrical in size. You can always take out the 2x2GB and replace them with 2x4GB. CAS Latency (timing) improvement isn't something your going to notice anyway.

 

Either way I think as long as you have sufficient RAM for whatever activities you are undertaking you don't need to worry about too much else.

 

Its a dual channel system. 2 slots are slightly better then 4.
FB-DIMM had 4 channel rams. But that is Xeon ECC memory. There you got performence gains by having 4 slots installed.

BTW. Memory speed is one of the most overated specs on a PC. Stock memory vs superfast memory gives a 2-4% faster system. And how many programs use more then 4 gigs on a gaming system?

The point: On X86: Going from 32bit to 64bit introduces a performance penalty that is about 3% in all benchmarks. Only memory hog programs that use more then 3.5 gig memory sees speed gains in 64bit on X86.

Since 32bit systems can support more then 4 gig memory (Intel server chips did that for years) it would have been better to have windows remain in 32bit, but have 40 bit memory addressing (max 288 gig memory), The difference whit that system would be that programs would be limited to 4 gig memory.

So go with 2 slots.

If you want to have the fastest computer ever: Install 4x16 gig memory and use it as a ram disk and install everything on it. The only problem is that you have to reinstall everything when/if power is lost. But system memory is 100x faster then a good SSD.

 

This is completely true but the difference is not that big between the 2 configurations so you won't notice it.