Desktop Ram Upgrade

[murdockman]

Hi all
Have a Dell inspiron 5800 desktop with 1gb x 4 (4gb) total ram at present wanted to upgrade ram have been told system can go to 16gb ram total which is best to use 4x4gb or 2x8gb and what make is best to use any help would be appreciated thanks

 

[Darkbreeze]

If your motherboard supports 8GB modules, then 2x 8GB is the better option as it's easier on the memory controller since it only needs to deal with the voltage and requirements of 2 modules instead of 4. What is your motherboard model number. It should either be printed on the motherboard itself or you can sometimes find it by downloading and running CPU-Z and looking for it on the mainboard tab.

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

 

[atomicWAR]

depends on your rigs specs. if your CPU uses dual channel ram using two sticks is best, not four. It introduces latency and reduces the top speed the ram can run at on some boards/chipsets. Basically the moral of the story is us as many stick of ram as channels your CPU uses. most new CPUs have 2 or 4 channels though some older ones based on the 1366 socket use 3 channels.

 

[Darkbreeze]

2 or 4 modules has no bearing on dual channel operation for nearly all modern platforms. You can have dual channel operation on two different banks, with pretty much any modern motherboard, and the CPU has little to do with it aside from whether or not the memory controller is capable of supporting a specific speed or voltage. There have been some motherboard/cpu combinations that supported triple or quad channel operation, which intel has limited on some platforms, but even those could still handle dual channel operation in all cases where the requirements for triple or quad channel operation were not met, so long as the requirements for dual channel operation were.

There is SOME bearing on this from the CPU, but mostly, all current consumer platforms support it.