ram can a single stick work in a dual channel motherboard

[alexzdro7]

i m building a pc and i was wondering if i can get a single stick of ram to work on the asus z170 a motherboard 

[Electronics Wizardy]

it will work fine, but it single channel.

[Energycore]

yes

[VirusStorm]

It will work fine, you can even add extra ram in the future

 

[Godlygamer23]

Yes. It will simply run in single-channel mode. A motherboard supporting dual-channel, triple-channel, quad-channel, etc doesn't mean you can't use the lesser types. It just means that if you want to use that many channels at the same time, you can, assuming the CPU supports the functionality. Now, if you're trying to run dual-channel on a motherboard that only uses single-channel, then that would be a problem. 

 

And the number of channels do not indicate the number of DIMMs usable in the same system. It indicates how many DIMMs can be addressed at once by the memory controller, thereby increasing the total theoretical bandwidth. For example, quad-channel systems could address four DIMMs at the same time at once, whereas a dual-channel system could address two at once.

[Bleedingyamato]

1 minute ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Yes. It will simply run in single-channel mode. A motherboard supporting dual-channel, triple-channel, quad-channel, etc doesn't mean you can't use the lesser types. It just means that if you want to use that many channels at the same time, you can, assuming the CPU supports the functionality. Now, if you're trying to run dual-channel on a motherboard that only uses single-channel, then that would be a problem. 

 

And the number of channels do not indicate the number of DIMMs usable in the same system. It indicates how many DIMMs can be addressed at once by the memory controller, thereby increasing the total theoretical bandwidth. For example, quad-channel systems could address four DIMMs at the same time at once, whereas a dual-channel system could address two at once.

Does dual-channel mode make much difference vs. single?  

[Godlygamer23]

1 minute ago, Bleedingyamato said:

Does dual-channel mode make much difference vs. single?  

It will increase the total theoretical bandwidth by 2x, but the benefits will be subjective to the task at hand. People have seen increases in performance when having many browser tabs open at once, but I imagine that number would have to be extremely high. Anything bandwidth limited will benefit from multiple channels.

[asand1]

Running dual channel would be beneficial if running on board graphics. Otherwise run the biggest single stick you can to leave empty slots for future upgrade. 

 

FWIW, mixing RAM generally works so adding a stick later shouldn't be a problem.