Better have 4 sticks or 2 sticks of ram despite price difference ?

[Boombi]

Budget: I don't really care, obviously the cheaper the better

Country: Belgium

 

Hello, I'd like to upgrade to 32 gigs of ram at 3600mhz, I'm ditching my older 3200mhz ram so I need fresh sticks. I don't plan on ever upgrading to 64 gigs of DDR4 because I believe once I'll need to do that it will probably be for DDR5 sticks that I'll be looking for. Anyways, I know it is better in theory to have 4 sticks rather than 2, but in my case the 4 sticks are 30€ more expensive than the 2 sticks, is it really worth it or should I just go for 2 sticks of 16gigs, thanks.

 

[Levent]

Depends on the ram and rest of your system to be honest. It is harder to run quad rank (two dual rank dimms per channel) at higher frequency (especially on ryzen) than dual rank (two single rank dimms per channel).

[HanZie82]

I would go for the 2stick set.
For what @Leventsaid.
But also if you wanna expand later you can if you have room to spare. It uses less power. Generates less heat. etc.

 

And NO 4 sticks is NOT better then 2.
More the other way around.

[Boombi]

21 minutes ago, Levent said:

Depends on the ram and rest of your system to be honest. It is harder to run quad rank (two dual rank dimms per channel) at higher frequency (especially on ryzen) than dual rank (two single rank dimms per channel).

 

6 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

I would go for the 2stick set.
For what @Leventsaid.
But also if you wanna expand later you can if you have room to spare. It uses less power. Generates less heat. etc.

 

And NO 4 sticks is NOT better then 2.
More the other way around.

In that case I'll go for the two sticks then thanks.

[Lord Nicoll]

29 minutes ago, Boombi said:

Budget: I don't really care, obviously the cheaper the better

Country: Belgium

 

Hello, I'd like to upgrade to 32 gigs of ram at 3600mhz, I'm ditching my older 3200mhz ram so I need fresh sticks. I don't plan on ever upgrading to 64 gigs of DDR4 because I believe once I'll need to do that it will probably be for DDR5 sticks that I'll be looking for. Anyways, I know it is better in theory to have 4 sticks rather than 2, but in my case the 4 sticks are 30€ more expensive than the 2 sticks, is it really worth it or should I just go for 2 sticks of 16gigs, thanks.

 

It's very dependant on the sticks, what topograpgy the motherboard is, if you're manually overclocking, how many ranks are being interleaved, and the timings and speeds. If everything is the same, same timings, ranks, channels, speeds, you will only see differences in the margin of error. It's when you start to get into different memory configs that this question becomes harder to answer, so I'll use one example in the real world I had a couple months ago.

My friend upgraded his 4x8GB 2400MHz JEDEC DDR4 with 2x16GB 3200MHz not great XMP kit, and in doing so we went from 4 dual ranked DIMMs to 2 single ranked DIMMs, and despite the increase from 2400MHz to 3200MHz, the bandwidth was basically the same. He saw no performance increase and he was on a 3900X. 

Higher levels of ranks perform better for the same speed, but usually can't go as fast. If you're manually overclocking 2 DIMMs with single rank would overclock further. However you'd need to push them pretty far, probably more than a normal person overclocks.

The sad part is, it's not as easy to see from the DIMM itself what config the kit is without all the codes and model numbers so before you upgrade, take some benchmarks of the performance, upgrade and see if it got any faster. Alternatively you could look for a kit that maintains the same amount of ranks and in theory should therefore be the same, while outperforming due to speed. 

I'm a fairly good overclocker and can manually tune memory timings and speeds so I usually go for 2 single rank DIMMs, but a normal person not wanting to spend loads on a super high end kit of XMP memory might get better value out of 4 dual ranked DIMMs with normal speeds and timings vs 2 single ranked DIMMs. Thats 8 ranks vs 2, not hard to see how it outperforms it. 

As for motherboard, if it's a T-Top board, not too common now adays, 4 DIMMs overclocks better, if it's a daisy chain board, which most are now adays, 2 DIMMs in the outer slots of both channels will overclock better. 

[brob]

1 hour ago, Boombi said:

Budget: I don't really care, obviously the cheaper the better

Country: Belgium

 

Hello, I'd like to upgrade to 32 gigs of ram at 3600mhz, I'm ditching my older 3200mhz ram so I need fresh sticks. I don't plan on ever upgrading to 64 gigs of DDR4 because I believe once I'll need to do that it will probably be for DDR5 sticks that I'll be looking for. Anyways, I know it is better in theory to have 4 sticks rather than 2, but in my case the 4 sticks are 30€ more expensive than the 2 sticks, is it really worth it or should I just go for 2 sticks of 16gigs, thanks.

 

 

Why are you upgrading from DDR4-3200 to DDR4-3600? Unless there is a significant difference in timings (e.g. CL20 to CL16), or the work is memory intensive you won't see any difference in performance.

 

[Boombi]

On 3/14/2022 at 3:42 PM, brob said:

 

Why are you upgrading from DDR4-3200 to DDR4-3600? Unless there is a significant difference in timings (e.g. CL20 to CL16), or the work is memory intensive you won't see any difference in performance.

 

Sorry, hadn't seen your reply, it's because I now have some games and applications that lag because they get me to 15+ gigs of ram usage so I'd like to upgrade to 32 gigs and my current ram which is 3200mhzC14 is so expensive that's it's 50 more euros to get 32 gigs of 3600mhzC16 ram instead of 16gigs of 3200mhzC14. And since apparently 2 sticks is better than 4 well it just is better for me to buy entirely new sticks.

 

Hope it clears your conffusion.

[brob]

58 minutes ago, Boombi said:

Sorry, hadn't seen your reply, it's because I now have some games and applications that lag because they get me to 15+ gigs of ram usage so I'd like to upgrade to 32 gigs and my current ram which is 3200mhzC14 is so expensive that's it's 50 more euros to get 32 gigs of 3600mhzC16 ram instead of 16gigs of 3200mhzC14. And since apparently 2 sticks is better than 4 well it just is better for me to buy entirely new sticks.

 

Hope it clears your conffusion.

 

I wasn't confused, just wondering at the reason for such a move.

 

Two sticks are not necessarily better than four or vice versa. 

 

Given the timings of the 16GB of DDR4-3200, it likely would have been better to go that route. Not that it would make an appreciable difference in most situations.