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Dual Channel DDR on nForceII

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compunut124

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im wondering do you think it would be better to buy two 256mb sticks and put them in dual channel to get the upped memory bandwith or would it be better for a singular 512mb piece any thoughts on this would help for i cant decide which is better for me to oc my new board with

Soon to be rig
Asus- A7N8X
AMD Athlon 1900+ AGOGA Stepping
V8420 Geforce 4 TI4200 128M with Video In, DVI/TV out
?Memory? --well its going to be Cosair XMS series
2 - WD800JB - OEM Special Edition
Enermex Server Case w/ 400w Powersupply
 
I'd lean towards getting a single stick as you'll be able to overclocker higher than with two sticks. DCDDR only gives you another 3-5% whereas you could see a much higher FSB with only one stick thereby giving yourself a much larger advantage.

~THT
 
I would say something, but me an THT are discussing this in another thread :D

Go for 1 stick if you're buying all of the parts right now, AMD's can't use that much bandwidth. 1 stick of PC3500 will take almost anything an AMD system could throw at it.
 
gotta disagree here. if you plan on a near future upgrade then yes get one 512 stick of some corsair xms or similar. however if you aren't planning on buying more ram anytime soon buy 2*256 sticks. with the nforce 2's i haven't seen anyone get higher fsb's with 1 stick vs 2. I know this is the norm but these boards are designed for 2 stick operation. also things other than your cpu use bandwidth. the higher bnadwidth you have the better. sure you may not use all of it but you will see improved performance
 
I gotta agree with snvpa on this one. There is one thing you people are overlooking. Sure pc3200 and pc3500 would get little preformance boost from it, but what about pc2100? Utilizing Dual Channel on these would defy the point of uping you fsb, all you woul dhav eto do is change th emulitlyer. Also, 2 sticks would most likely overclock just as high as long as you get to high quality sticks. Also, If you go with the pc2100, you might be able to afford a gig of ram. Sure you will lse some 3dmarks, but thnk of the loading time and real world usage :drool:
 
1 Stick will get you more bandwidth if you plan on running 200 + fsb , i know first hand .I had 2 sticks of xms 3500, 1 stick i'm running 11x200 on a xp 2400 , stable as you can get, with 2 sticks i only could get 190 fsb stable.
 
Was that on a DualDDR setup, or regular DDR?

On regular DDR, of course you can get a better O/C with 1 stick. On DualDDR I don't think it matters.

TheFrag - You'll never avoid having to change the FSB on an AthlonXP system! All it can handle at stock speeds is DDR266. The new ones can handle DDR333 of memory bandwidth. Upping the fsb is a must, but even a 200mhz fsb will only have enough room for the bandwidth on DDR400 RAM.

That's my major gripe with AMD systems. Even in a REALLY high overclocked state (200mhz+) they still can't handle big amounts of memory bandwidth. Now this may change with the Athlon64, hopefully it will.
 
DEZMOND, are you sure that's right? Are you saying that you get more bandwidth with one stick or more fsb? I mean if you run Dual Channel DDR with 190fsb, your total memory bandwidth should be 6080. But if you are using a single stick, then your bandwidth with 200fsb would only be 3200. I'm not saying that the 190fsb isn't better than the 200fsb, I'm just trying to understand what you meant.
 
The only benchmark that I ran with two sticks was sandra,@ 190 with 2 sticks i hit like 2900 ,with 1 @200 fsb i'm into 3000 . I just couldn't get stable at 200 even with multiplier of 10 on a 2400 .I figure i'll run the 1 stick until corsair releases the new ram designed for nforce 2.
 
What about it? We're trying to figure out if DCDDR offers an advantage that negates the lower FSB OC. Care to run a bench with your current setup then remove a stick of RAM and OC your FSB as much as you can and then run another bench?

~THT
 
In general one can OC better with 1 stick. However, we still don't really know the advantages of Dual Channel yet, there are no benchmarks that properly rate it yet... Sandra shows (like THT said) a 3% - 5% gain but Sandra does not recognize DCDDR yet. The jury is still out on how much of a gain DBDDR really gets you. FWIW, I've got 2 sticks in Dual mode running 200 sync stable as can be.
 
We just gotta kind somebody that'll test it.

My hypothesis is that it won't make a difference since it's two separate memory systems dealing with 1 stick each.

Or........it CAN make a difference because the system wouldn't have to worry about 2 memory systems.........
 
I was just going through this dillema, and i myself am interested in faster timings rather than high fsb speeds, i see better results that way anywayz so i think you should get the 2 sticks, take advantage of that dual bandwidth, we see these benchmarks that only show a little difference, but i dont think that those benchmarks know how to properly measure dual channel preformance, and yeah maybe the CPU cant use it all, but maybe your video can, who knows, im not seeing enough info on this to draw many conclusions at this point, but i myself am getting 1 stick of 256 PC3200 right now and plan to get another when i can afford it.

Matt
 
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