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dual channel ram
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Original Message
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Name: eskiled
Date: June 13, 2004 at 08:41:45 Pacific
Subject: dual channel ramOS: winxp homeCPU/Ram: amd athlonxp 3200+/512mb |
Comment: can someone just explain to me what dual channel ram is and how it works and if its better and anything special about it. thanks...
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Response Number 1
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Name: PC Bob
Date: June 13, 2004 at 09:31:14 Pacific
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Reply: (edit)I haven't used this on my system yet, but here's how I understand it: You put in two identical memory sticks, say 512 Mb. The system the senses this and runs at the higher memory speed, with 512 Mb showing. Basically, that's it. Anyone have a better explanation? Bob
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Response Number 4
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Name: jam
Date: June 13, 2004 at 09:57:07 Pacific
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Reply: (edit)Dual channel is a way of combing the bandwidth of two RAM sticks & treating as one. Take two sticks of 256MB PC2100 for example. On a system running in single channel mode, the 2 sticks would be treated as 512MB of PC2100. Dual channel mode would treat it as 512MB of PC4200. Sounds good, huh? Now read the link posted by darksea....
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Response Number 6
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Name: egkenny
Date: June 13, 2004 at 12:46:38 Pacific
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Reply: (edit)There is no such thing as "dual channel ram". There are motherboards that have two memory controllers instead of the usual one. For example suppose you have 3 RAM slots. Suppose RAM slots 1 and 2 are connected to controller 1 and RAM slot 3 is connected to controller 2. If you have RAM in one of these configurations you are running in "dual-channel mode:"
1. Slots 1 and 3
2. Slots 2 and 3
3. Slots 1, 2, and 3 The confusion come in talking about what RAM to use for this. Because memory timing is more critical when using two memory controllers a lot of people have had trouble using any old RAM with it. Some companies after getting a lot of bad feedback about this starting testing 2 sticks together in a dual-channel motherboard. If the 2 sticks worked well together they packaged them together and gave them names such as Corsair's TwinX. Nvidia was the first to push this concept with their Nforce2 dual-channel chipset for AMD CPUs. Intel was not far behind. AMD has gone a step further moving the memory controller into the CPU istelf with their 64-bit CPUs. The regular Athlon 64s have one controller in the CPU. The Athlon 64 FX and Opterons have two controllers internally. You can say then that any board with an Athlon 64 FX or Opteron is by default running in dual-channel mode with RAM in the right slots.
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