I am rebuilding my system. Question is : Two sticks of 1Gb DDr2 240 pin. 4 sticks of 1Gb, or 2 sticks of 2Gb. All are PC6400. OS will be XP Home or Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, Dual boot. I remember some where that it will only recognize 2 GB of the 4GB. Don't want to go to Vista. What works best. Price seems to be about the same. Thanks in advance.
32 Bit OS's are only able to utilize 3-3.5 gigs of memory its just the nature of the beast. could you link what ram your looking at? if the ram is of good quality then obviously go with the 2x2gb set it leaves to room to upgrade later, in addition 2 sticks puts less stress on the memory controller, it also will allow a little better overclocking in your into that. so 2x2gb over 4x1gb any day.
Let me try to link what I'm looking at. A-Data 2GB DDR2 RAM PC2-6400 800MHz 240-Pin DIMM Major/3rd A-Data 75ICMD0178 Ignore my current computer at the bottom of this post. I have new CPU, Motherboard and GPU.
Adata ddr2 800 G.Skill ddr2 800 G.Skill ddr2 1000 I have a pair of these, they are very stable I made these links on a different vbulletin forum becasue for some reason this one does not have the link option enabled but yet it still works if it is typed in manually. Adata ddr2 800[/URL it looks like that all thats needs to be added is this symbol ] at the end of the /url
It's a good question and I'd love to here a knowledgeable technical answer however the only thing that occurred to me was that two sticks would use less juice so on that basis I'd say two is better than four I just don't get this. How?
think of it like this, if there are 20 IC's on a stick of ram, thast the numebr of chips it can fit on it. now if you have four 1gb sticks you would have 80 IC's for the computer to search through when it is looking for information, but if you have two sticks fo 2 gigs there would only be 40 IC's to go through to find what is needed. IC's or Intergrated circuits are the chips of memory on a ram stick. for my G.Skills the IC's are PowerChip (PSC)-( PowerChip Semiconductor Corp.) there are several manufacturers of them. you also have to take into account that some motherboards have problems using all four slots
Surely the number of IC's the MCC talks to is irrelevant. Regardless of whether there are 32, 64 or 2 million actual memory chips on a RAM module the MCC will still have to keep tabs on the same amount of RAM, it would just so happen that its laid out in a different physical format.