Memory 1x4GB or 2x2GB?

Anyone know whether there is any practical difference between having 1 4gb stick of dual channel 1600Mhz DDR3 or 2x2gb?

 

1x4gb would make it a lot easier to upgrade to more ram if you wanted to, at a later date. On a dual channel motherboard you may get a small performance boost with 2 sticks but I don't think it would be noticeable

 

1 stick can not run in dual channel mode I don't think.

 

^what he said

for now go 2x2 or 2x4

 

Ah, that makes sense thanks nxt question

Is there any practical difference between 2x4gb or 4x2gb?

 

2x4Gb will give you less expensive upgrade options

Some custom coolers make it hard to access ram in the closest slot to the cpu, and can clash if you use a heatspreader with fins, most motherboards nowadays put the first usable channel as slot 2 and 4 instead of 1 and 3 to avoid this situation.

Some memory controller and ram combinations require that you run at a 2T command rate instead of 1T with more than 2 sticks of ram, some people say that 1T gives a snappier overall feel to the system, others don't notice the difference.

2 sticks of ram will save a small amount of power compared to 4.

If you are overclocking, or messing with timings, less sticks = less chance of a stick being weak and impeding the overclock.

 

I would go with 2x2gb or 2x4gb and as someone said above 1 stick cannot be in dual channel.

 

Thanks guys, always interesting to see how much I still have to learn!

 

Hell, some motherboards/cpus will actually run the memory at a lower speed if all DIMM slots are occupied.

2 is by far the better option (except with 9xx i7's and triple channel memory)

TSB

 

The difference is more now than when dual channel first emerged, you'll notice it the most with apps and games that can actually make use of the extra bandwidth. I've seen 6fps improvements with Crysis for instance just by going from single to dual channel, in that game 6fps is quite a big deal.