Hey people! I'm looking to build a nice semi-budget workhorse (not so much gaming) machine for a friend, and i'm trying to stretch to i7. In order to Make the platform work on the budget that was set vor me, i could skimp on the memory, and not buy an "i7"-branded triple set, but go for 4GB of "AM3"-intended sticks. Ofcourse i'll make 100% sure that the voltages work out (i know about the low voltage constraints for i7), but i was wondering if that works well at all, since it's always said that 90% of us don't ever use the extra memory bandwidth. Any benchmarks anywhere? I couldn't find them
I'm pretty sure I saw a benchmark somewhere, could have been on BT. IIRC there was a very minor performance difference, nothing groundbreaking. They even recommended to just get dual channel. (But this was very early when Nehalem launched.) Lets see... Nah, couldn't find anything else than this: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2009/01/26/intel-core-i7-memory-performance-review/1
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1...y_analysis_can_dual_channel_cut_it/index.html Tweaktown did their own test on the i7 with dual instead of triple-channel. Seems there's no huge difference.
Cheers mates, kudos for the linkage, that was exactly what i was looking for True, but that thing has triplechannel memory support plus one socket that, if filled, reduces the total mem to single channel. Anyway, dual will run on any X58 board.