Does your pc run faster when you have all 4 dim slots populated?

[Techpenguin101]

Is your pc faster when you have it on quad rather than dual and single?

[Derrk]

they essentially double or quadruple bandwidth respectively. As far as speed goes, i think the jump to dual channel from single channel is much larger than the jump to quad from dual.

[Get Booda]

Just now, Derrk said:

they essentially double or quadruple bandwidth respectively. As far as speed goes, i think the jump to dual channel from single channel is much larger than the jump to quad from dual.

There is no quad channel support on consumer platforms, only dual channel with 2 dimms per channel

[Techpenguin101]

3 minutes ago, Get Booda said:

There is no quad channel support on consumer platforms, only dual channel with 2 dimms per channel

Wait, so is it dual-dual channel then?

[AirSocial]

So whats faster quad or dual?

[WihGlah]

 

[RenaKry]

Sometimes. If you have a chipset that supports quad-channel memory, then you'll see improvements, albeit mostly minor, up to four sticks of RAM. If your board only supports dual-channel memory, adding more than two sticks of RAM won't net you any performance increase, aside from just having more RAM.

One of the four channels on my X99 board went up in flames, so I am currently running my computer in triple-channel memory mode by sticking the RAM into another channel (B1,B2,C1,D1) with no noticeable difference to performance.

[AirSocial]

For example you have 4 sticks of 2GB

Then you have 2 sticks of 4GB

What would give the better score?

[Arttu89]

7 minutes ago, AirSocial said:

For example you have 4 sticks of 2GB

Then you have 2 sticks of 4GB

What would give the better score?

Given all other variables to be equal (memory speed, CAS latency, chip quality, etc.) in theory there should be no diffrence, in practice 2x 4GB sticks will usually edge out the 4x 2GB sticks (given the same memory speed and latency values), but it won't be a noticeable diffrence in day to day work.

[it_dont_work]

Yes and now, dual channel dual rank can be faster, realistically the more dimms populated the more stress on the imc and lower overall overclock can be.

 

End of the day, in memory hungry applications (compute work loads science etc) yes theres a noticeable difference, and benchmarking  

[HoneyBadger84]

Overall, if your system only has 4 slots and is dual-channel, having all 4 DIMMs populated on modern boards/chips doesn't make much difference. When this becomes more of a thing is in memory overclocking, as some cpu/board combos are actually designed with 4-DIMMs in mind, like mine, when actually has been shown to have better memory overclocking with all 4 populated vs just 2 of the 4. 

 

I don't understand the details of why myself, but it has to do with the layout inside the motherboard of how the DIMMs talk to the memory controller inside the CPU. There's actually less noise when all 4 are populated, vs when 2 are not. That isn't the case with all boards, but it is with this particular one. Builzoid from YouTube sort of explained it in his memory overclocking guide for this board. 

 

At default, stock vs stock, there is no noticeable difference on the vast majority of dual channel motherboards, going from 2 slots to 4 slots populated, as far as I know.