Upgrade to Dual Channel - Worth it?

[McHopsky]

I have 1gig stick of Kingston DDR2 PC2-5300 667mhz and I was thinking about buying one more exact stick and running them in Dual Channel mode. It's going to be about $115. Would this extra stick of 1 gig running in Dual Channel make a differance in my overall computer and gaming performance? Worth the money?

On a side question - I bought an aluminum Vantec heatspreader for aesthetics more than anything. Before I put the heatspreader on, the RAM wasnt warm at all, now, when I touch the heatspreader it seems pretty hot. This makes sense since it is aluminum, but I've heard heatspreaders can actually decrease your RAM performance because it heats up your RAM, instead of cools it. Is there a way to tell if the heatspreader is doing more bad than good?

Thanks!

 

[turtile]

IT IS WORTH IT. Its twice the speed. RAMsinks are useless for the most part. RAM doesn't really need much cooling.

 

[003]

The move to dual channel wont make much difference, but the extra ram probably will.

 

[john3]

yo 003, wuold you mind cleaning out ur PM box, i want to send you a message, for future help.

 

[alexsabree]

Since you already have 1gb i wouldnt.. cause dual channel does make a big difference when you dont have a lot of ram.. but since you already have 1gb i really would jus save your money
If i had to guess it would make a good performance increase on games like BF2 and FEAR cause battlefield2 uses 1.25 gb ram at the most part.. i wouldnt do it

 

[Nitestick]

1gb is fine but if you want to go for 2gb then dual channel may help a little. i don't think the dual channel bandwidth has nearly as much a performance boost for intel cpus as AMD's because they rely so heavily on the on-die L2 cache

 

[Apokalipse]

that depends what programs you run on your computer. some programs take up a lot of RAM, so 2GB will give you a performance boost over 1GB, however 2GB takes longer to address than 1GB does, so smaller programs will take slightly more time to load. though you shouldn't notice the slow-down unless you have 4GB RAM, where the system can sometimes struggle with all the RAM it has.

 

[003]

yo 003, wuold you mind cleaning out ur PM box, i want to send you a message, for future help.

Sure, didn't realize it was full. I emptied it now.

 

[McHopsky]

As for heatspreaders, could they cause harm to the RAM if it gets too hot? I dont really need it and the RAM is a lot hotter than it used to be, now that I have the spreader.

 

[john3]

k thanx 003.