4x1GB vs 2x2GB - Current wisdom

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gathagan

Gawd
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Historically, using 2 slots has been better than using 4 when it came to maximum performance.
Is that still the case?

In my particular case I'm dealing with an Asus P5N32-E SLI and an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe.
Both running Vista 64-bit.
 
There's usually no significant difference, however systems tend to overclock better when using two sticks rather than four.
 
If you occupy more memory slots it will put more stress on the memory controller when you overclock, which could lead to instability, I believe.

However there are a few older boards out there that don't handle the 2 gig sticks so well though, so it can be a bit of a mixed bag.
 
That'd have to be a fairly old board. Most new boards (P965,X38,X48,P35,P45, 790i, 780i) haven't had a problem with 2GB sticks at all and I know most 975x boards can handle them.
 
There are some P965 boards that only function properly at 667MHz with 2 gig sticks. P5B series is one.
 
MaxTheLimit said:
There are some P965 boards that only function properly at 667MHz with 2 gig sticks. P5B series is one.
Click to expand...

That may explain why my P5B Deluxe won't overclock my Q6600 for crap with 2x2gb installed. I may just have try 4x1gb and see if I get any better results. Although even with FSB 333 and ram at 1:1, this POS board has issues. I know the CPU is good for at least 3.2ghz in a G31 board.

Or maybe it's time to ditch the P5B Deluxe altogether. :D
 
PC_User said:
2x2GB > 4x1GB. The fewer sticks the better.
Click to expand...

This has been my experience. Plus, you have the ability to upgrade to 4x 2GB later on when RAM prices go down that much farther. Although, sometimes motherboards can be picky like people have mentioned above. If in doubt, the MB manual usually tells all.
 
Mackowitz said:
That may explain why my P5B Deluxe won't overclock my Q6600 for crap with 2x2gb installed. I may just have try 4x1gb and see if I get any better results. Although even with FSB 333 and ram at 1:1, this POS board has issues. I know the CPU is good for at least 3.2ghz in a G31 board.

Or maybe it's time to ditch the P5B Deluxe altogether. :D
Click to expand...

The reason it oc's like crap is because the 2gb sticks need a higher trfc to oc then the 1gb sticks. 2gb sticks usually need around 52 trfc while 1gb need between 20-30 I believe. I your case I would get 4x1gb, and they should oc well.

PC_User said:
2x2GB > 4x1GB. The fewer sticks the better.
Click to expand...
Not neccesarly. You could oc 4x1gb of D9 to at least 600mhz. It would be very rare that you could do that with 2x2gb. You can do it with 2x2gb if you get very lucky or you buy the $300 2x2gb PC2 9600 GSKILL Kit.
 
Some boards have stability problems with 4 sticks of ram, especially if it is sensitive to the ram being used.
There are quite a few reports of certain ram consistently failing in some boards, even using 2 slots but much more for 4 slots.
This can result in having to use low clocks/higher latency settings/higher voltage or replace the ram.
Its better to use 2 slots if possible.
 
Nenu said:
Some boards have stability problems with 4 sticks of ram
Click to expand...
I takes a decent board to oc 4 sticks.

Nenu said:
There are quite a few reports of certain ram consistently failing in some boards, even using 2 slots but much more for 4 slots.
This can result in having to use low clocks/higher latency settings/higher voltage or replace the ram.
Click to expand...
Yea D9:D
Here is some info,
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=140870
Another theroy for the dead d9 was that the vdimm power supplies on asus and gigabyte motherboards had a lot of ripple in them. I kind of lean toward this theory because you don't see d9 die on dfi, biostar, etc like asus and gigabyte motherboards.(but this could as be because they didn't sell as many boards also though) I know for a fact that a lot of the older gigabyte motherboards overvolted the vdimm at least .1v .(At least my p35-ds3r did, and apprentally the p35c-ds3r was worse)

edit: I also forgot to add that drive strenght may have been a contributing factor to.
 
If overclocking then fewer modules are better than more if the board supports 2GB modules. If not overclocking, it doesn't much matter.
 
PC_User said:
2x2GB > 4x1GB. The fewer sticks the better.
Click to expand...

You lose dual channel memory controller capability in that scenario.
Don't know how big a factor that is on the motherboards themselves, but it certainly made a difference in systems based on AMD 754 cpu's vs AMD 939 cpu's.
The fact that the mem controller is not on-die with pre-i7Intel systems may make that a moot point, or at least not one that's noticeable apart from benchmarks.
 
gathagan said:
You lose dual channel memory controller capability in that scenario.
Don't know how big a factor that is on the motherboards themselves, but it certainly made a difference in systems based on AMD 754 cpu's vs AMD 939 cpu's.
The fact that the mem controller is not on-die with pre-i7Intel systems may make that a moot point, or at least not one that's noticeable apart from benchmarks.
Click to expand...

you only lose dual channel with 1 or 3 sticks
 
I faced the exact same decision as you. My motherboard was a Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe and I was running 1GB on 2 512 sticks about 2 years ago. I upgraded to 4 512 sticks and was expecting a huge performance increase but isntead I was getting Blus Screens of Death!!!!!! Mostly in really memory intensive games liek Midevil 2 total War. (Was Running Vista 64).

My Ram was the over clocked OCZ Gold Edition (All 4 sticks were exactly the same) and it took me forever to figure out what was wrong. In the end I finally realized that 4 high performance sticks were killing my motherboard. I later got confirmation from OCZ that some motherboards (They callout out ASUS) crap the bed when you try and run four sticks of Ram at the frequencies that those sticks were set to. Sure enough I scaled back my RAM in the BIOS and everything was stable.

So I will never try and run max number of sticks again, I wish I just binned the 2 512MB sticks and just bought 2 1GB sticks instead, would have saved me alot of trouble. This was back in the DDR1 erra though and from what it sounds like DDR3 is ALOT more stable because of the lower voltages and motherboards have come alot furthur along as well, so this may not be an issue any more but sure was it a pain before.
 
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