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help me settle a RAM bet...
my inspiron 570 came with (1) 2-gig stick of ram. i just added (2) more sticks of the same exact ram... total of 6 gigs. my buddy says i'm not getting the dual channel performance now that i am using 3 sticks. i see a total of 5887 MB avail memory for my system. should i remove one stick and deal with less RAM in exchange for dual channel, or does it not matter? beer and pizza for the winner.
theflash1932
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January 13th, 2012 23:00
The technical answer to your question is that three DIMM's on a dual channel controller cannot run in dual channel mode, however, just because you aren't running dual-channel with 6GB doesn't mean that you're better off with 4GB in dual channel mode. I would run some benchmarks of your own, comparing 2x2GB with 3x2GB ... it is possible that the extra 2GB of RAM will give you more of a performance boost than the 2-5% increase from running dual channels. If you can show your friend that you are rendering/converting/loading a video edit in the same (or less) time with 6GB (3x2GB) than with 4GB (2x2GB) in dual channel mode, perhaps you can both be right. The "best" option would be to get one more 2GB DIMM ... then you can run 8GB of RAM in dual channel mode :)
zaphodd42
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January 13th, 2012 23:00
hm... ok. looks like i'll be serving some humble pie with that pizza. i AM running 64-bit win 7. and i'll be editing HD video. so... take out one stick and use 4gigs in dual channel mode? thanx for your answer, "flash"!
zaphodd42
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January 13th, 2012 23:00
ah-ha! very good! i will benchmark away! thank you for your time!
theflash1932
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January 13th, 2012 23:00
Well, it is absolutely true that your configuration cannot take advantage of dual-channel memory performance. In order to have dual-channel performance, you must have the memory populated properly (channels populated identically). Most benchmarks I've seen indicate a marginal increase in performance using dual-channel, but an increase nonetheless. Whether you would benefit more from the small increase in performance with 4GB or from 6GB of RAM depends on what you are doing with it. You might do some experimenting yourself with your setup to find out. However, if you don't have a 64-bit OS, then it is pointless to use 6GB ... just use two DIMM's.
jmsandrsn
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January 15th, 2012 16:00
I'm not sure if your system will support this but some Intel chipsets support "flex" mode where the paired modules (2 x 2GB in your case) will work in dual channel mode and the unmatched module (1 x 2GB) would not .
theflash1932
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January 15th, 2012 20:00
The 570 uses an AMD chipset.