Dual Channel Memory Question

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ilikecake

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Feb 20, 2006
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My parents computer is having memory problems. It is an old P4 Northwood 2.6Ghz on an Abit IS7 motherboard. They had 4x256mb PC3200 DDR modules on the board, but one of them went bad. If I take out the offending module, the motherboard will go back to single channel memory with 768mb, and if I take out two modules, the motherboard will be dual channel, but with only 512mb of memory. Which one of these would be a better idea for use with windows XP?

I intend to replace their entire computer in the near future, so it doesn't have to be a long term solution, but I would like to get the best possible performance in the mean time.
 
I had a similar problem only with 4 sticks of 512. I did some 3dmark testing and the 1gig performed slightly better then the 1.5 gigs.

But in this case I would guess you would see more of a gain with the additional memory. Run some tests? Doesn't take long
 
ilikecake said:
So the capacity is more important than the speed?
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In this case, yes. The performance improvement from the extra 256MB will be much greater than going dual channel. You'll still notice that the PC is much slower as XP will have to use the pagefile more.
 
P4s were always starved for memory bandwidth, and dual-channel provided a huge performance benefit in many cases. Considering the relatively small increase in capacity with the extra 256MB stick, I recommend you stick with 512MB in dual-channel. From personal experience, I can tell you that it'll be faster overall.
 
ALL4AMD said:
IIRC the p4 was bandwidth starved so cutting the bandwidth in half would kill performance.
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And that's only really relevant if they're doing anything remotely performance-intensive, which they're probably not... In which case the extra memory is gonna make the entire system a lot snappier, Win XP does struggle with only 512MB of memory, even under pretty normal usage (I should know, I've still got a P3 933MHz Win XP system here running on 384MB :p ). I'm with those that are saying the capacity > dual channel, if taking into account the users of the system.

If you were only concerned with how well, let's say, one game would run with very little running in the background, then yea... Running 512MB in dual channel might matter more. Doesn't sound like that's the case though. Point is, having the system hit the page file more often is gonna be much more of a performance hit than not running dual channel, and for light usage another 256MB will probably help just enough.
 
ilikecake, if your parents are typical parents and surf the net, check email, etc, use the 768 for sure. If they are power users and are using bandwidth humgry apps, they "might" be better off with 2 x 512mb. You'd have to test 2 x 256 DC vs 3 x 256 SC head to head to be sure.
 
ilikecake said:
I intend to replace their entire computer in the near future, so it doesn't have to be a long term solution, but I would like to get the best possible performance in the mean time.
Click to expand...

Have them weather the storm with 768 until you replace their rig. I assume near future is 3 months or less anyway
 
Thanks for the replies guys. I will have them use the 768mb single channel for a bit. 'Near future' means whenever buy.com sends me my damn case so I can finish their computer, so it shouldn't be too long.
 
Did you consider the e7200/7300's I know its $50 more but thats quite a step up. I assume this is a email/internet and looking at pictures PC; should be a nice cheap one.
 
I did consider the Intel processors. I ended up going with the AMD just because it was a bit cheaper, and I doubted that my parents would be doing video encoding/gaming and would not notice the difference.

Plus, I don't want their computer to be too much faster than mine. I might get jealous. :p
 
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