Upgrade to Dual Channel - Worth it?

[BennyV04988]

Midi you didn't get banned yet? "woman user" you have so much to learn arrogant one...



SOO much to learn.

 

[Nubius]

dual channel=good

heat spreaders=Gimmick

Pretty much sums it up. Heatspreaders usually use a thermal tape which does CRAP for actually transfering the heat. Sure the aluminum they are made of would transfer heat nicely, but the tape inbetween the RAM IC's and the heatspreader itself doesn't move heat worth crap.

Under normal circumstances RAM doesn't get hot. They only really get hot once you start OC'ing the crap out of them and putting in over 3v, but since you're using DDR2 it's using way less voltage to begin with so I'm surprised your even feeling warmth of the heatspreaders.

Bare RAM with a simple 80mm fan blowing over it is more effective than heatspreaders. If you wanted to be more effective I'd get actual RAM sinks and put a tiny dab of AS5 in the center, with superglue along the edges. That way it's straight RAM IC, through thermal paste, and into the metal. Much more efficient. That's what I have for my 6800GT, but in reality, video card memory REALLY doesn't get hot, but I love the ramsinks I got. Tweakmonsters.......mmm they are purdy

 

[ShoobieRat]

if your not having any problems with your games, then whats the point? unless your playing games such as BF2 that need the extra ram.

That's a good point. He hasn't said what he is doing with the machine.

Capping your RAM at 1gig is not a standard. It's not even an intelligent comment.

If all you're doing is playing old games and doing low-power homework, 1gig is plenty. However, your needs beyond that are entirely dictated by what you are doing with the machine.

For example, if you're doing CAD work, compiling, graphics/audio work, heavy gaming, 3D modeling, etc, you're gonna want more RAM.

As a real-world example, when I only had 1gig in my box and I was doing complex AutoCAD renders, it would take several minutes. Once I popped in another gig, the rendering time went down to around a minute. When I popped in my 3rd gig, the machine renders like a bat out of he-ll. The reason is that the rendering engine requires a huge amount of space to work with, and the less RAM I had, the more times it had to swap with the HDD during the process, which makes things ugly.

 

[Law]

For those who overclock or want to squeeze every ounce of performance out from thier machine then it's worth it to set up your ram for dual channel. I have 2x512MB Kingston on my system running in Dual Channel, I can't feel any signifcant improvement when I'm gaming, but the benchmark software statistic shows other wise. I gain about 20% more performance compare to single. I have heard people getting up to 40% (probably overclocking). I don't overclock my system.

Heatspreader are useless in my view, if the system get's warm, so does any other hardware inside. First off if you want to cool your RAM much more efficiently, consider buying a side panel with a 120mm fan attached to it to blow cool air towards the motherboard. Instead of just cooling a single device, a side panel fan can cool the entire board.