actually the best corsair puts out right now is 2x 1gig DC Corsair Twinx XMS pc3200 2-2-2-6. its what i got and its whats on the home page(cprsair)
Yeah not everyone can spend all their money on 2gbs of the highest performance RAM.......try to prevent useless posts like these, as they are seen as nothing but bragging, he's talking 1gb which he stated clearly and needs to know what will give him the best performance.
1) whats the difference between the normal ram .. and dual channel? i mean
When you see ram listed as 'Dual Channel' RAM, all it means is the two sticks that come in the kit have both been tested and is guaranteed to run in dual channel when you put it in. Your motherboard and CPU both have to support dual channel for it to work which I believe yours does, one of the main benefits of socket 939 is having dual channel abilities. All dual channel is, is basically supposed to give you a performance increase, depending on what article you read it can be anywhere from 5 to 50%, but for the most part you won't notice a huge system increase if you had 1gb of that XMS in Single Channel then changed it to Dual.
So all in all 1gb of XMS RAM technically will not perform as good as 2x512 sticks that have the same timings and are running in Dual Channel, BUT if you'd rather hold out and wait until you can afford another stick of 1gb, then you'll perhaps be able to (as long as you buy the EXACT same stick ) then you can run Dual Channel in the future. You'd have to check your manual to see if the mobo supports it and in what slots, if you have only 2 slots and it supports it then bam it goes in those two
Some boards have 3 slots, different colors, each color is a 'channel' so you want one ram stick in a different channel so therefore it's running in two or 'Dual Channels' see what I mean?
Anywho, if you got a single 1gb stick then like I said down the road when you get another, if you get the EXACT SAME you might be able to run the 2gb in Dual Channel, but it really wouldn't matter anyway as 2gb of high performance RAM will be enough for anything anyway so that little extra DC performance will hardly register.
EDIT: Oh yeah, some motherboards may only accept Dual Channel up to a certain size like 1gb, but if you choose to instead fill up the board can have like 2gb's but no dual channel, so on some it's a toss up, more memory? Or have the memory run in DC? buuut you'd have to check your motherboard for that.
Generally I'd say like:
Up to 1gb Dual Channel DDR400
Up to 2gb DDR400
which means exactly what I said above. If you only get 1gb you can have it run in Dual Channel, but if filled up, then you just simply have a lot of ram, no DC
