Question about RAM

[raverbaby]

Hi,

I bought an entire system from YYT and it included the Asus P5B motherboard. I remember when i was purchasing RAM for it the man told me the ram needed to be matched, so i bought a pack of two 512mb ram sticks.

I want to purchase another gig of ram, and i was wondering whether it has to be two 512mb modules or is it ok using a 1gig module?

And is their much difference in performance in RAM? Surely ram is just ram?

[YOYOtech - Nav]

Hello mate,

When you bought your system you were syggested to buy a pair of ram so that you can reap the benefit of dual channel capability of your motherboard. So right now your motherboard would be working in dual channel mode with a pair of similar ram sticks.
Now if you would like, you can buy 1 single stick of 1gb ram but if you would install that in your system it would disable dual channel mode and your system would start working in single channel mode. Hence that would deteriorate your system performance very slithly say by the tune of 3-4% and please note that we are talking about performance hit only due to loosing dual channel mode and has nothing to do with amount of RAM. Still you can do it if you want but make sure the Ram has got same specifications and brand as to the pair you have already bought for good system stability.
We would still suggest you to go with another pair for an upgrade rather than a single stick.
And performance difference in RAM would depend on the RAM you are comparing.

Cheerz

[raverbaby]

Thanks Nav,

in terms of mhz in RAM is there really a noticeable difference say between 500mhz to 620mhz?

obviiously on paper theyre different but i dnt want to pay the extra if i dnt notice the extra

[torched_geek]

There's a noticeable difference if you overclock them,
Otherwise, there isn't any difference at all from what I know, they are just very handy when it comes to that.

Originally Posted by torched_geek

There's a noticeable difference if you overclock them,
Otherwise, there isn't any difference at all from what I know, they are just very handy when it comes to that.

Agreed, its very hard to tell the difference in the performance of the system, Its abit like when DDR2 533 was first launched, the bennchmark results were virtually the same as an equivilent setup using DDR 400.

[raverbaby]

so there's not much benefit between ddr and ddr2??

[dave87]

DDR and DDR2 are completely different - and cannot work in conjunction. If you currently have DDR2 then you would need to add more DDR2 ram, DDR would not fit or indeed work (or vice versa if using DDR)

[Andrzej]

Almost

I think the point was that you can have great systems or terrible systems with either kind of memory

Bear [no pun intended or copyright infringed Dave87 ] in mind that for ages, Intel had moved to DDR2 whilst AMD stuck with DDR...

...and the AMD-based systems of that era won quite comfortably

In general, more memory is way more important than type etc