The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    dual channel vs more ram

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by mcaj007, Jul 31, 2007.

  1. mcaj007

    mcaj007 Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    1
    Messages:
    160
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    Which one would be more advisable - 2GB dual-channel or 2.5GB total ram?

    I read somewhere about asynchronous dual-channel, but how would I know if the 2GB ram that i'll add to my already present 512MB will make it asynchronous dual-channel?
     
    mcaj007, Jul 31, 2007
    #1
  2. vespoli

    vespoli 402 NBR Reviewer

    Reputations:
    1,134
    Messages:
    3,401
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    105
    2.5 GB will be better. Running in dual-channel mode will not outweigh the benefits of an extra 512 MB. Dual channel will offer about a 5% performance benefit (at least what i've seen/heard)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_channel
     
    vespoli, Jul 31, 2007
    #2
  3. deadsimple

    deadsimple Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    7
    Messages:
    191
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    Dual channel VS single channel will only be a few % speed difference as mentioned.

    Having plenty of memory VS running out of free memory and causing hard-drive swapping is like dropping from 5GB/s (peak memory data-rate) to ~50MB/s (hard-drive transfer speed while swapping). Massive difference.

    Hence you won't notice the dual-channel performance increase if you go that path, but you sure as hell will notice an insane degradation in performance if you run out of memory.
     
    deadsimple, Jul 31, 2007
    #3