Would more RAM slow me down?

[TalRW]

I currently have a gig of PC3200 RAM in my PC. My dad just got a pretty cheap replacement for his PC for about $100 bucks from his workplace and is getting rid of his old PC. I was looking through it and it had 512 megs of RAM and I could snatch one of his 256 sticks and put it in my computer.

I'm just wondering if this would in fact slow me down because firstly I know the RAM is pretty old so I'm betting it operates at a slow clockspeed (I could use CPU-Z to check it out but I'm lazy) secondly I'm already running in dual channel mode and I think this would disrupt that. So in the end would it be worth it to stick an extra 256 in or should I just keep it the way it is.

[edwardaune]

Keep it the way it is. You're right, by adding another stick of ram your losing your dula channel capability.(not that you would see the difference) But why change that little tweak, they all start to add up. And besides that a gig of ram is more than enough for 95% of the things that most people do.

[Fragmaster]

My board says I can have 3 dimms installed while still maintaining dual channel.

[johan851]

My board says I can have 3 dimms installed while still maintaining dual channel.
The three DIMMs in that case would have to be matching - two 256mb sticks in the single channel slots and a single 512mb in the 3rd, for example. That wouldn't work in this scenario.

Stick with what you have. 256mb won't make much of a difference, and it's definitely not worth the major loss in speed. If this is older PC2100 RAM, you'd be going from 200MHz to 133MHz. That's a huge bandwidth hit.