3 ram sticks

[shod1213]

Hi

does it hurt perfomance to have 3 ram sticks instead of 2 ? (dual channel ect)

and same question for 2 sticks of 8 gb and one of 16?

thanks

[Crunchy Dragon]

Unless it's a triple channel board(not likely), you lose a bit of bandwidth by having 3 instead of 2 or 4.

 

The loss likely won't be noticeable at all, but it will be there.

[Fasauceome]

Motherboards have for a long time been able to operate in hybrid mode. If you are using, for example, only 8GB out of 16GB, your system will prioritize the dual channel ram and operate with dual channel. But if you use more than your dual channel ram capacity, your system switches to single channel.

 

Like @Crunchy Dragonsaid, it would result in a small performance deficit. 2x or 4x is preferable.

 

Also an added benefit is going from single rank to dual rank with 4 sticks of ram, most any cheap DDR4 is single rank and adding 4x single rank dimms will give you a dual rank configuration, which can provide a small performance benenefit.