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Community => The Lounge => Hardware/Software => Topic started by: Spanky on Friday, May 28, 2010, 15:05:22 PM
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While overclocking my server I thought I would try 4 sticks of RAM instead of 2 to see if there's any benefit like 2 sticks over 1. All 4 sticks are the same make and model, I just use 2 for power reasons and the fact that I don't need anywhere near 4GB of RAM on it. Anyway, there is a benefit of using 4 sticks over 2. Both Memtest and Everest benchmark showed a benefit. It was largely on copy speed but read and write showed minor improvements as well. In Memtest, the MB/s # jumped about 100 with 4 sticks. I know reading and writing are more important than copy speeds but an improvement is an improvement. Something to keep in mind.
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Interesting. It this on some sort of double dual-channel motherboard?
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Yea, that's what I thought. It's on a regular DDR2 desktop mid-range motherboard. I do have screenshots of Everest that show differences, I'll post them later. I even ran it a few times to see if there was a program loading heavy on RAM or something and it came back the same each time.
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Here's the screenshots I promised: (Notice that no frequency or timings have been changed)
2 sticks:
(https://aao25.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fdl.dropbox.com%2Fu%2F464376%2Fheadshot%2F2%2520sticks%2520stock.png&hash=63b4b171226c9b79fa6ba8a050a3dea0)
4 sticks:
(https://aao25.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fdl.dropbox.com%2Fu%2F464376%2Fheadshot%2F4%2520sticks%2520stock.png&hash=e4146877b2bbfa86f015a0be3e9c48ee)
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Has any other website that is statistically reliable tried anything like this? Or is Headshot way ahead of everyone else?
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I've never seen anything on this before and I just googled. I think most people (like myself) would think that RAM running at the same speed, it wouldn't matter if it was 2 or 8 sticks, it would all be the same speed. I see a lot of discussion about 2 sticks being easier to overclock and less stressful on a northbridge than 4 sticks. As well as 2 sticks using less power than 4 but nothing about benefits of using 4 sticks.
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More RAM = More dynamic RAM previews.
I only really see more RAM as a benefit to film/postprocessing editors and probably video game designers.
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I just verified that all 4 sticks use the Promos 90nm chip. There's no difference in any of the sticks, dual channel is enabled on 2 or 4 sticks. This is showing that there's an actual difference.
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Since this thread is about memory speed testing, I thought I would share my server's current overclock.
2 sticks stock:
(https://aao25.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fdl.dropbox.com%2Fu%2F464376%2Fheadshot%2F2%2520sticks%2520stock.png&hash=63b4b171226c9b79fa6ba8a050a3dea0)
4 sticks stable overclock:
(https://aao25.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fdl.dropbox.com%2Fu%2F464376%2Fheadshot%2F4%2520sticks%2520oc.png&hash=64d7d8cb178dc9bfda4e1b3630dbf8e8)
Quite a bit of difference. I may try to go higher but I'm pretty happy with the speed. At load, the CPU is still on stock volts and when idle it clocks down to just over 1GHz using .87v. I have the fans setup with Speedfan and I can almost turn them off when idle (completely passive except for the PSU) but the northbridge is Nvidia and even when idle, the damn heatsink can burn. This causes heat build up with no airflow so I run all the fans at 30% in Speedfan so it's dead silent and nicely cool :) Like, right now, it's about 8 feet from me with the side panel open and I can barely hear the fans. <3 Speedfan.