One or two gig, and how many sticks?

[Tringa]

Thinking of building pc (AMD based dual core & I want to try some overclocking) and fancy 2 Gig of DDR RAM.

1. Will I see an advantage to having 2 Gigs rather than 1? Main uses will be gaming, surfing.

2. Is there any advantage to using multiple sticks of RAM? For 1 Gig, which is best - 4 x 256, 2 x 512 or 1 x 1Gig, similarly for 2 Gig is there any advantage in 4 sticks each 512 Mbs over 2 sticks each of 1 Gig?

TIA

[dave87]

2gb, 2x1GB sticks

It really depends on whether you are going AM2 or 939, but for both I would recommend 2Gb.

[MSIC]

You will not see any advantage between 1 gig and 2 gigs in normal surfing. Well, unless you go to pages with Shockwave flash on
As for games, there are a number of games (Fear, BF2, Oblivion etc) that 2 gigs has a measurable improvement either in the fluidity of the game or speedier loading times.
And I concur, 2 x 1GB sticks has some theoretical benefit over 4 x 512 sticks, but more importantly it leaves you the option of adding more memory in years to come.

[charleski]

And I concur, 2 x 1GB sticks has some theoretical benefit over 4 x 512 sticks, but more importantly it leaves you the option of adding more memory in years to come.

Using only 2 sticks allows you to run your memory at the faster 1T command rate with AMD processors, though this may not have much impact on benchmarks.

[sawyen]

uhh.. AFAIK, 1T and 2T difference only matters when you bench...

2T really means < 3% in real life on worst case scenario..

if you already have 2 sticks of 512MB, then just get another pair.. save you the trouble of selling it and getting fresh 1GB sticks..

But certainly, if you're building it new.. 2 sticks 1GB makes more sense...

[charleski]

uhh.. AFAIK, 1T and 2T difference only matters when you bench...

From Anandtech: "Several benchmarks were run to compare performance at 1T and 2T timings, but we could not find any real-world performance improvements with the 1T timings compared to 2T. "

[Tringa]

Thanks all