Best Placement and combination of RAM

[harmonSmith]

hello everyone. I have 4 RAM slot in my motherboard (Intel DG35EC) in which two are blue and two are black. currently I have 1GB Kingston RAM and I want to put additional 2 GB RAM. It is better if I buy 2*1 GB RAM or single 2GB RAM will also work good with my current 1GB RAM. What is best placement of RAMs in that kind of scenario. Also can I use dual Chanel with this configuration

[freeztar]

hello everyone. I have 4 RAM slot in my motherboard (Intel DG35EC) in which two are blue and two are black. currently I have 1GB Kingston RAM and I want to put additional 2 GB RAM. It is better if I buy 2*1 GB RAM or single 2GB RAM will also work good with my current 1GB RAM. What is best placement of RAMs in that kind of scenario. Also can I use dual Chanel with this configuration

 

Whether to go with a single 2gb chip or 2x1GB chips depends on the prices you can get as well as your future upgrade plans. If you don't plan on upgrading the computer by more than 4GB in its lifetime, then it doesn't matter. Go with the best prices and best memory you can get.

 

If you go with 2x1GB chips, then put those in the same bank (ie both in blue, or both in black).

[alexander]

yes with most desktop mobo's it does not matter which slot you put ram in, if it's not ECC, but having different colors may mean that your mobo supports ECC ram, and that works better when it's configured in pairs, i.e. if you are planning to put 2 gigs of ram into a machine, instead of using one 2gb stick of ECC ram, you get better reliability (and really the only way that ECC works) from 2 1GB sticks configured in ecc pairs... and how those are configured depends on the mobo, generally if there are 6-8 memory slots, every other one is configured to be the EC pair, but i have seen configurations of outside in, so 1/6 2/5 3/4 on some quirky hardware...

 

But no, you dont get better performance out of having more smaller memory chips, and it really does not matter on single processor machines, or intel dual cores, on amd side it's different, dual as well as intel quad and Amd quadcore machines have 2,2 and 4 memory controllers, controlling either 2 channels or 4 chanels of ram, meaning that you actually get a RAM latency decrease by supplying the mobo with more sticks of ram, to give each bus for each controller a stick to use. And yes here is a difference in processor manufacturers, the intel dual dual cores (they call them quad cores), have 2 external to the processor memory controllers, amd quad cores (no not dual dual cores) have each core have their own memory controller built in, so the processor actually has direct ability to access ram, which makes them faster in that regard... So, hypothetically, you would get better performance by putting memory on each bus for each controller vs having all the controllers clash over access to the same but bigger stick of ram...

 

Either way, you won't notice the difference (except for ECC thing above). With DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) at 128bit dual channel ram, the peak transfer rate is (128bit/8bit)*200MHz*2channels=6400 megabytes per second transfer, that means that at 4GB at optimal performance, the computer can read the entire contents of ram and completely write over it in 1.25 seconds... good enough for me :)

[gregdevid]

hello everyone. I have 4 RAM slot in my motherboard (Intel DG35EC) in which two are blue and two are black. currently I have 1GB Kingston RAM and I want to put additional 2 GB RAM. It is better if I buy 2*1 GB RAM or single 2GB RAM will also work good with my current 1GB RAM. What is best placement of RAMs in that kind of scenario. Also can I use dual Chanel with this configuration

hi,

I think you have to buy single 2gb because in future if you want to upgrade ram then you have option for ram slot.

[alexander]

that board only supports 8 gigs of ram, if he is getting 2 right now, 2x1gb works just as well as 1x2gb, he can get a 4gb and a 2gb later or he can get 2 packs of 2x2gb... memory is cheap, 40 bucks gets you a 2x2gb in ddr2-800 of quality ram, or 99.99 for one 4gb... i wouldn't worry about it