Fastest RAM set up?

[burceps]

Alrighty, i'm sure this has been asked before but just for funzies, i'm starting my own thread.

I usually have about 2gb of ram in use and just under 4gb when im playing a game. I don't think i've ever broken 4gb, and i've never had to use any massive programs that will. BUT....i have two 4gb ram modules.

1) When two cards are in use and recognized by the cpu is it automatically using both cards and sharing the data in both them like two hard drives in raid0 or is it filling the cards with instructions sequentially (wait to max capacity on first card before using second card)?

2) IF its filling the cards sequentially, and given my 4gb cards that aren't expected to use more than 4gb for anything i'm doing, is it faster to ONE 4gb card or multiple smaller cards that will get filled up (say two 2gb cards or even four 1gb cards)?

honestly, i haven't noticed any reason that i should be worried about the speed of my system...at all....but just out of curiosity i'd like to get some tasty answers for these questions from anybody who can create a good guess or knows from experience!

thanks community!
-burceps

 

[blazorthon]

1) what do you mean by cards? If you mean the RAM then no to both assumptions. Data is stored pretty much "where ever" on the RAM modules within specified address ranges. Having two modules (or more for some motherboards) will increase performance but for different reasons than RAID 0 like striping, but won't increase it very much unlike the large performance benefit of striping.

2) If RAM did fill up sequentially then it would be faster to have as many smaller modules in as many channels as possible but RAM doesn't fill sequentially.

 

[burceps]

awesome thanks! is there anyway you can see how much data is on either module at one time (rather than just seeing total data stored in ram)? with SLI set up i know i can turn on the visual indicator of load per card in real time, so is there anything similar to that for ram?
thanks!

 

[blazorthon]

I've never heard of such software/settings for system RAM. I don't think it has been done but theoretically it seems possible. I don't think it would be as simple to make such a program for system RAM as it is for video cards so it probably won't be done. I'll look around anyway out of curiosity.