upgrading ram

[krap928]

hey,
I bought a dual channel 2 x 1gb rams.
One of them is defective so i only use 1gb ram at the moment.
I bought another set of dual channel 2 x 1gb rams which are
different brands from the ones i bought previously.
Is it ok for me to have 3gb ram instead of 4? Would there be problems
that will occur from having 3gb ram?

 

[gurusan]

It's fine but 1 set won't be running in dual channel, meaning you lose a small amount of performance.

Also if you bought defective ram you should return or RMA it.

 

[krap928]

so my system will say that I have 3gb of ram but the performance will not be
"really" 3gb ram and it will be a little less?

 

[gurusan]

No, you'll have 3gb of ram and it will be quick. It's just that it would be around 5% faster if everything was running in dual channel. Which is not something you would be likely to notice. It's just that it's not running at full potential..

 

[krap928]

o ok thank you very much =)

 

[veedubfreak]

Actually i forget which place did the testing, i think tom's, but the performance impact of running single and dual channel was very minimal. Under 5% which is within the margin of error, so you wont notice it, especially when you are getting the benefit of 3gb instead of 1gb.

 

[krap928]

hmm... so you mean that either way i will be benefited by having 3gb of ram instead of 1gb but i wont really see a difference with the dual channel ability?

 

[gurusan]

Correct. There is a very small performance hit when running in single channel mode...and there's a large performance gain when going from 1-3gb.

The good outweighs the bad by far. However, you should be able to RMA your ram if it was sold faulty!

 

[krap928]

thanks so much.
i build my own computer with little knowledge on how everything works
and i heard about 8 years ago from my uncle who said that if i inserted
a 64mb ram and a 128mb ram together, the 64mb ram wouldnt count or somthing like that... so i was just curious if that was true or what not.
Thanks a lot =)