Memory question

[ffutures]

My Windows PC (quad core, Windows 7 64-bit) currently has 8gb RAM as one 8gb DDR3 (I think) SDRAM card.

As I understand it, I would get better performance if I has this as two cards, either two 4gb cards instead of the 8gb, or another 8gb in the second slot.

But is this actually worth doing, or is the improvement too small to matter? I doubt I'm using anything that really needs that much RAM, and the only game I play currently is Oolite, so I'm reluctant to make changes if it's only a teeny speed boost.

Comments

[coth.livejournal.com]

I'm upgrading from 3gb to 6gb next week. I don't know if this is comparable, but I'll let you know if I notice a significant improvement anyway.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

What I forgot to say is that the jump in performance from 3gb to 6gb is likely to be a lot more obvious than 8gb to 16gb. With 3gb you're probably caching some memory out to disk at least some of the time, which slows things down. With 6gb it's more likely that everything will be in memory, not cached, so faster.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I would not expect any noticeable improvement by moving to two 4Gb sticks. Not for a desktop.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

OK, good to know - seems odd that vendors would bother to mention it in that case. Is the jump to 128-bit memory addressing (if I have that right) not that big a deal?

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Well, it will be faster - I dont think it is 128bit addressing, but rather using two channels at once. But what I meant was I dont think you - as a human being - would be able to notice the difference without doing some kind of performance test.


But that is just my opinion. I do use matched pairs in all my machines, rather than single sticks of RAM - so I am not telling you not :-)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I've really no idea - it seems to perform reasonably well, but not outstandingly so, which is probably more to do with running Windows etc. than memory. If the upgrade was a relatively cheap option I wouldn't hesitate, but it looks like the alternatives are either to buy 8gb as 2x4gb and sell on the 8gb (probably at some loss) or buy a matching 8gb, neither is really going to be cheap.

[coth.livejournal.com]

Well I now have 7gb configured as 2x2gb + 1gb. It's noticeably faster, but for some reason my old non-USB mouse no longer works. I had to install a USB mouse instead. Odd that.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That's a weird one. No idea what would cause that.