Question about Ram

[Shawshank]

Hi,

 

I have a DFI NF4 SLI board and

I also happen to have 3 sticks of 512MB ram.

 

Question is if I put 2 sticks in it will be dual channel right?

 

What's the effect of putting 3 sticks in then?

 

Thanks!

[oliveryochest]

when you buy a dual channel kit, it will operate in dual channel. thatsif you bought them in a kit(2 sticks).

[Prostock62]

As long as you have the 2 sticks in the right dimms either 1 & 3 or 2 & $ they will run in dual channel and the 3rd stick will be just added to the ram in single mode.

[ShadowX]

Correct me if I am wrong... but I think dual channel means you can load data from HDD to RAM faster, and also be read by CPU faster. Often the RAM will become CPU's bottle-neck while HDD will become RAM's bottle neck. So by having dual channels, it will prevent your CPU from having to wait for data from RAM.

 

As for larger RAM, it will mean that more data can be kept on your RAM longer thus you don't have to load it from HDD all the time.

 

Often, upon loading of the game, the frequently used data will be loaded into the RAM, during this time, I don't think it differs between single and dual.

 

Then upon execution, CPU read from RAM and dual will allow a faster read, thus if you have the important data on the dual RAMs then it will be fetched faster by CPU.

 

The size matters when the program requires a lot of memories. Say if there is a program requiring 2G of memory, then by having 1G only, that means it will need to be swapped between the other 1G from HDD, but if you have 1.5G then it will only need to be swapped between the 512mb on your HDD. However I doubt if there are any programs out there requiring so much RAM, thus I'd say stick with dual mode only to ensure a faster CPU fetch of all data.