Dual Channel memory

[Zuhalter]

I am a bit confused. I am looking at getting a MSI K7N2 Delta-L motherboard. I noticed that it says it "Dual Channel" for memory. I have a 512MB stick of PC3200 DDR400 RAM. Will I need another chip? Or will this work? Any help or info is appreciated.

[imbest123]

For dual channel to work you need 2 of the same ram sticks in the mobo.

[morriswindgate]

Don't worry about Dual Channel RAM, although it was hyped big time by NVidia, it does not make that much difference in performance as explained in this paragraph from Tom's Hardware Guide.

"Buyers enticed by dual channel DRAM should note one crucial thing: in theory, a dual-channel memory link does not bring any benefits since the data rate is limited by the FSB bus's bandwidth. It's fixed at a maximum 200 MHz (Athlon XP 3200+) to give a bandwidth of 3.2 GB/s. Even using fast dual DDR400 memory with an access time of 6.4 GB/s has no effect on the Front Side Bus bottleneck of 3.2 GB/s. With that in mind, it's really not so inappropriate to question dual-channel memory technology on the Socket A platform."

[TwoRails]

Performance gains can be from 2% to 15% per benchmarks on the system system compared when DualDDR is on or off. Performance differences between roughly the same mobo, but with different chipsets (if quality) may or maynot show that large of gain, but a gain is still present.

I've read a few articles like the one above, and I don't buy it for several reasons. First, and most important to me is that I get a small performance gain when I'm running Dually. The second reason is that they assume that the memory is running at full blown max speed with no latency and the like.

DualDDR is like adding one more "pipe" or adding a little cache, making sure data is there and ready when needed, not waiting for the system to go fetch the data.

Finally, there are too many benchmarks out there showing a performance gain with DualDDR... so they are all wrong or somehow false? I don't think so...

[/rant off]

TwoRails

[morriswindgate]

TwoRails, I only half agree with you> Only Intel CPUs (533 and 800MHZ FSB CPUs) have the ability to utilize the enhanced performance offered by Dual DDR. The AMD CPUs that are used on the board the original poster is using are stuck with the 3.2GB/S bottleneck, thus the VIA KT600 Chipset with DDR3200 benchmarks as good as or better than the NVidia Dual Channel boards with DDR3200.

Here is a pretty good white paper on Dual DDR

http://www.kingston.com/newtech/MKF_...whitepaper.pdf

[TwoRails]

Thanks for the link morriswindgate - I'm going to have to do more reading on this...

TwoRails