3g 6400 vs 4g 5300 2ch

Which one perform better?
a single channel 2g + 1g 6400ddr2
or
dual channel 2g + 2g lower 5300ddr2

 

The 4GB are better than the 3GB. Frequency and dual/single channel aren't very important.

 

FYI 3GB will still be running in dual channel, just asynchronously.

 

Not necessarily. Depends on his chipset and CPU.

 

Wait, I thought to have it run as Dual Channel you need identical chips. In my case my Aspire 5517 comes with 2gb and 1gb as most 5517 i think.

Really? I thought it does. What if I say 3gb pc2100 vs 2gb pc3200 dual ch? Will you still say 3gb is better than the 2gb?

 

Yes, I'd take the 3GB over the 2GB any day. Besides, as has already been said, your chipset and CPU may support "Flex mode", which means that with 2GB + 1GB you have 1+1 running in dual-channel, and an extra 1GB in addition to that.

 

But then you would be talking about DDR memory. In that case it depends on what you need out of the computer. The faster dual channel ram would significantly increase the ability of the processor to get more work done, while if you don't need that processing performance, more memory would serve you better. In the case of DDR2 it is more clear cut. Unless you are relying on the integrated graphics to be as powerful as they can be, always go with quantity over dual channel, and only after those two do you look at frequency, and then timings.

 

Perhaps, although if you're talking about DDR memory the CPUs in question would also be much slower anyway.

 

Cool cool, thanks guys. So do any of you know if the Aspire 5517-5997 AMD turion 1.6 3gb of RAM has "Flex Mode"? I know it's dual channel capable.

Will soon put back in the Turion 1.8 Dual Core.

 

I'm speaking from my experiences from back in the day. In the time before DDR2 was released, running memory in dual channel was of utmost importance. There were huge performance losses across the board by running in single channel. Also memory frequency and timings noticeably affected performance in benchmarks, and I'm not talking memory benchmarks.

These days, DDR2 and DDR3 provide much more bandwidth than DDR ever did and memory controllers are much more capable of efficiently using what they have to work with to the point where these things have much less of an effect on performance.

 

Flex Mode is an Intel feature, so I think they probably wouldn't support it.