Benefits...

Y

yot

n00b
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Aug 24, 2004
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1
im wondering what the benefits are of 2 gigs of ram installed as:

4x512 versus 2x1GB
 
i'd see it more as a detriment than anything. cause if you ever want to add more, you have to toss 2 sticks of ram, but if you had 2x1gb initially, you could just put in another 2x1gb and have 4x1gb..
 
Because the data doesnt have to travel to different dimms it doesnt make that much of a difference anyways but id rather have 2/1gig sticks than 5/512sticks
 
And so would I but I upgraded from 512 (2x 256) to 1024 (4x 256). Thanks for answering.
 
tamislan said:
And so would I but I upgraded from 512 (2x 256) to 1024 (4x 256). Thanks for answering.
Click to expand...

I had a planned upgrade from 512 MB of DDR333 (but undercranked to DDR320 due to a CPU/RAM FSB mismatch) to 1 GB DDR400, and I was able to do it, though not the way I had planned. However, I found a few welcome surprises along the way.

I went to a local Best Buy and was looking for Corsair XMS Pro Series, but UNfortunately, they were out of stock, so I bought the same size sticks of PNY OPTIMA (also DDR400), took them home, and, after following correct shutdown procedures, swapped sticks (the new sticks going where the old sticks used to live).

The standard timing on the new sticks, surprisingly, turned out to be *worse* than the smaller and slower sticks they replaced (3-4-4-8 vs. 2.5-3-3-7); however, I have not done any fiddling with the timings, as memory bandwidth is better, despite the slower timings (4100 vs. 3000 MB/sec @ stock clockings).

Next up was a 5% overclocking (CPU and memory) via the BIOS. (The E Deluxe's AMI BIOS lets you dial-in overclocking in five-percent intervals.) The five percent overboost improved memory bandwidth even more (4500 MB/s @FSB 420). However, an additional five percent boost brought bandwidth down to where my old memory was, so I dropped back down to the five-percent overclock. (Stability was *not* affected at either boost level; however, I was already aware that the P4 is a bandwidth pig.)

I've been running ever since at the five percent overboost and I have had not *one* issue regarding stability in anything. Not the OS, applications, or games. I'm using *bone-stock* cooling (the RAM itself has no heat-spreaders, and I'm still using the stock Intel HSF on the processor).

So that's how I went from undercranked to overboosted in a day.
 
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