How much does dual channel help?

I have 1x 512mb stick of geil pc3200 valuram and a 9500pro oc'ed at 350/317. Would I expect a large performance increase in games if I got another geil stick and ran it in dual channel mode?

The reason I ask is because I am running ut2004, and no matter how low/high I turn the graphics, I still get times where my mouse won't move the point of view of my character. It still seems like the fps is high, but its like I can't move for a fraction of a second every so often when turning and shooting at players. Do you think that this is caused by my lack of memory/dual channel mode?

-----The rest of my computer-----------------
barton 2500+ @ 3200+
abit nf7-s v2
maxtor 160gb hd (8mb cache & 7200 rpm) on serillel
mat****ta dvd-rom sr-8585
windows xp pr w/sp1
latest omega drivers & radlinker

Modern games are starting to use more and more ram, and in most new releases, you will see a benefit in load times and such with a gig of ram.

Dual channel with AMD setups makes virtually no difference. There's quite a lot of tweaking needed to get UT 2004 working right, go to the games section, there's at least three topics with advice.

thanks for showing me the ut2004 thread in the games section, I have my problem fixed now.

I've been doing some testing of twin 512 MB KHX3000 on an 8RDA+, Rev. 1.1 and these are my findings:

1. You won't feel much seat-of-the-pants difference between 1 GB DC and 512 MB SC.

2. The increase in bandwidth between DC and SC is maybe 3318/3114 versus 3280/2990, hardly earth-shattering.

3. Funny thing is I max out at the same fsb in DC or SC with this setup! Yep, I lose no mhz going from 512 MB SC to 1 GB DC. I think the reason for this is the 8RDA+ is unmodded, so what's limiting me is the 1.55 VDD and 2.85 actual VDIMM. If I could get more, maybe SC would pull away in peak fsb (I'm currently maxed out at 215 fsb, 2-2-2-5 at 2.9 VDIMM in the BIOS). The exact same ram has gone 250, 1:1, 2-2-2-5 at 3.2 volts on P4 boards (DDR500).

On other occasions with this board, I only lost maybe 2 mhz going from SC to DC, one 512 MB stick to two 512 MB sticks.

The biggest improvement I've seen in 3D smoothness when running 1600x1200x32, 4xFSAA, and 16xAniso, is going with 256 MB ram on the video card versus 128. Definitely smoother at high resolution gaming.

Also, the overclock on the video card is the biggest factor in improving 3D performance. The difference of maybe 20 mhz in the core is good for 400-500 3DMark2001 points.

Wouldn't the DC help in memory bandwidth intense areas? SUch as games, coding, and rendering?

MrBaz said:

Wouldn't the DC help in memory bandwidth intense areas? SUch as games, coding, and rendering?

Click to expand...

Obviously it wouldn't hurt, but you won't see as HUGE a difference in performance as with the 800 fsb P4 boards. For example, a 2.40C on an Epox 4PCA3+ board: running 250 fsb, 1:1, 2-2-2-5 with a single stick of XMS3500 nets me 2430 unbuffered. Running DC I get 3650.

Since I only have 512 MB sticks of ram, it's a waste to tie up two sticks in DC on an AMD board. And I can see no performance increase in 3D gaming going from 512 MB to 1 GB. I'm sure I can overclock in DC significantly higher if I was running 2x256 MB sticks.

If I buy a DC combo pack, would I be able to run even if my motherboard doesnt support DC? Or would I have to use 1 stick at a time until I buy a mobo that does support DC?

Thx

If your board doesn't support DC, than you must be using the old 845PE boards, or maybe an older SIS board. Yes, you can run two sticks ram on those boards, but it was much harder to overclock two sticks versus one. 512 MB ram is the minimum for gaming and there, you want to run one 512 MB stick for best overclocking.