2 sticks vs. 4 sticks

Discussion in 'CPU, Motherboards and Memory' started by shade46, Feb 29, 2008.

  1. shade46

    shade46 Geek Trainee

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    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.
     
  2. dmbjohn

    dmbjohn Geek Trainee

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    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.
     
  3. shade46

    shade46 Geek Trainee

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  4. dmbjohn

    dmbjohn Geek Trainee

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  5. Tech

    Tech Padawan

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    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 :p

    I just don't get this. How?
     
  6. dmbjohn

    dmbjohn Geek Trainee

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    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
     
  7. Tech

    Tech Padawan

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    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.
     

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