2+4GB RAM in dual channel motherboard?

[Plasmio]

I'm not entirely sure about the answer to this, so would it be safe to use a 4GB and a 2GB RAM stick in a dual channel motherboard?

 

[Kraszmyl]

Depends on the motherboard/cpu. Some older ones will not allow you to do that but we are talking 2005 era. If its anything ddr2 or ddr3 based you should be fine.

As for using a 2+4 arrangement. Realistically you most likely wont notice any difference from a normal paired set , but technically the sizes will throw off the calls a little bit. A more pronounced example would be the NVidia gpus with 2gigs on a 192bit bus where the ram distribution is uneven. But as previously mentioned I doubt there are any realistic scenarios that it will matter and you'll notice.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

It will not operate in dual channel mode. You will lose 5-7% performance over running matched sticks. However it is better to run 6GB total over a single 4GB stick that is also not in dual channel.

 

[Plasmio]

It will not operate in dual channel mode. You will lose 5-7% performance over running matched sticks. However it is better to run 6GB total over a single 4GB stick that is also not in dual channel.

I'm a bit confused. It WON'T operate at all with a 2+4GB dual channel configuration, or will the total performance will just be less than matching memory?

 

[Deleted member 217926]

It will work just not as dual channel memory. Dual channel adds 5-7% performance over single channel. So a single 4GB stick is already running in single channel mode so adding a second 2GB stick does not lose you anything in overall performance and helps you by adding more RAM. The best case scenario is 2 matched sticks so the motherboard can run in dual channel mode but as I said the performance loss is not huge. Just 5-7%.