General RAM question

[MnkyOf[-]ate]

I was just curious about the optimal amount of ram for a desktop PC,

is it better to have large capacity sticks (like 4x 1GB sticks?) or is that overkill?

or would it be best to divide 1GB amoungst 4x sticks of 256MB ?

because all ram has the same amount of pins and im guessing that if there is alot of ram per stick, that would probably degrade performance, so it might be better to have alot of smaller capacity sticks in dual channel?

 

[Senkin]

Well, there is the factor of the ram sticks also need to be the same speed EG. PC3200 or what not, or elce it will use the slowest ram in there and have all the ram run at that speed.

Then as for how many or how you should, technically having 4 1 gig ram sticks will be the best, have it that your mother supports 4 gigs.

But, as for a standard gammer I suggest 1 gig of ram (2 512's) at a minimum speed of 400MHZ (pc3200) on dual channel.

And no, not all ram have the same amout of pins, some are 32 (REALLY OLD simm's) and some can go up to 184 or more (DDR + DDR2)

I can go on and on about this but there is my suggestion as a comp tech.

 

[Logical_1]

For general use, I use 2x512MB sticks in Dual Channel on my system. It seems t work well and that is what I would recommend for others unless you do something that requires a lot of stuff to be in memory. If that is the type of work you do, maybe get 4x512MB sticks or 4x1GB sticks for your system. Don't worry about the amount of memory per stick as the bandwidth available is more than enough to handle the maximum size of memory on a single stick for the time being.

 

[BrokenX]

Very true, ram is good indeed but using to much might have to buy a few more fans because you system is working fare amount harder, meaning it could overheat, my point... fans.







BrokenX

 

[Mark YBARBO]

Here this will help
http://cache-www.intel.com/cd/00/00/09/52/95237_95237.pdf