I've scanned a few other threads quickly looking for the answer to my question and I've seen a few things that just gave me a couple other questions to ask. If these answers are elsewhere then feel free to lock this and direct me in the right direction. Currently I have 1GB of ram total. DDR to be exact. They are not the same speed, one stick is DDR3200 and the other is DDR2700 I think. I also have 2 free slots open and was thinking of expanding into them. Now I know that the fastest stick only runs at the slowest ones speed. Does this have any great effect on performance? Would replacing the 2700 with a 3200 give me a boost? Or would it be better to just get another 3200 and use all 3 at the same time? Dual Channel now. I don't know anything about this subject, just from what I saw in another thread. Dual channel makes the RAM run faster or what? I have teh 4 slots so I could seperate my sticks of RAM if it would make a difference. Would dual channel work while using 3 sticks of RAM? Or even with 2 sticks that have different speeds? Thanks in advance for any replies.
I think [link=http://www.hardwareforums.com/ddr-speeds-pcxxxx-ddrxxx-cheat-sheet-12882/]this thread[/link] will give you most of your answers hopefully.
The Difference between 2700 & 3200 DDR333 PC2700 = 2.7GB/s DDR400 PC3200 = 3.2GB/s as you can see, there is a 0.5GB/s difference between the two... in general, i prefer to have more RAM and a lower bandwidth, than a higher bandwidth and less RAM. [OT] Karanislove managed to post before me , the figures for RAM speeds where taken from the thread that karanislove linked to! [/OT]
And what about Dual Channel? How exactly does that work? It seems that I can have dual channel going on twice with my motherboard, the dimms actually have color coding on them white/blue to differentiate. Is it possible to use the current sticks of ram that i have with dual channel?
The prices of ddr333 and ddr400 aren't all that different so id personally go for the ddr400. DDR is 64bit memory but by running it in dual channel you can double this to 128bit. This why you have to have matched pairs of ram to run your system in dual channel. The overall effect is that your bandwidth doubles. So ddr400 has the potential of 6.4gb/s and ddr333; 5.4gb/s. So that difference between ddr333 and ddr400 has also doubled. If you run in dual channel the difference is 1gb/s. I personally always try to match the bandwidth my cpu has (ie 400mhz FSB and ddr400, 800mhz fsb dual ddr400 etc) It prevents bottlenecking between the cpu and ram.
