Is 1 stick of 4gb memory bad?

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3nter

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Apr 16, 2013
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Hi!
So, my question to you folks is if it is bad with one stick of 4gb of ram instead of two sticks of 2gb each, and that it may be causing lag? As you may have understood, I get lag on my computer. I've posted several threads and talked to experts in different pc components, but i can't seem to get my problem solved. Then on one of my threads a guy said that since i have 1 stick of 4gb ram and not 2 sticks of 2gb each, then this could be a bottleneck. He also said thet it should be capable of running in dual channel mode. Is this true?
 
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ksham
No. The point was to not use swap. Swap is slow. Just get another 4GB stick ram. 3.6GB is maxed out. When you buy a 4GB RAM, you don't get full use of 4GB, but rather about 85-90% of it. Some are allocated to hardware.

When buying RAM, please make sure the voltages are the same. Never ever ever mix voltages.

On a side note, you can create a swap partition. It has to be labeled as swap. Creating a regular 8GB partition does nothing. Not only that, your operating system must be configured to use that swap partition. If you're not aware of how to do this, it's best that you leave it out.
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ksham

ksham

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Mar 29, 2013
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What applications are your computer running? Most should not be affected by RAM speed. Dual channel will just double your bandwidth and therefore is faster, but unless you run memory hungry apps, you shouldn't notice. Try getting more RAM. Maybe you're maxing out and are using swap.
 
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3nter

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Apr 16, 2013
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I don't realy think my problem is to little ram, cus almost all games lag (even older games), and from what i can remember, none of the games iv'e played yet eats upp all the ram. I'm so confused, cus i've had this problem for over a month now, and I cant think of anything wrong with my computer, but my looking at the specs of my computer, it should be able to run games like BF3 on high graphics...
 
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ksham

ksham

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Mar 29, 2013
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You should have swap, but it's possible that you don't. Swap space is a small partition on your hard drive set usually to 2x your RAM space. So in your case, you should have an 8GB partition on your hard drive. So when RAM is near full, it will start storing data on the hard drive. This is very slow because HDD speed pale in comparison to RAM access time.
 
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3nter

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Apr 16, 2013
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so i should just make a partition on 8gb? Will the computer automatically store the data on that partition, or do i have to do something special with it? Can I use seagate discwizzard for the job?
 
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ksham

ksham

Splendid
Mar 29, 2013
8,398
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29,960
No. The point was to not use swap. Swap is slow. Just get another 4GB stick ram. 3.6GB is maxed out. When you buy a 4GB RAM, you don't get full use of 4GB, but rather about 85-90% of it. Some are allocated to hardware.

When buying RAM, please make sure the voltages are the same. Never ever ever mix voltages.

On a side note, you can create a swap partition. It has to be labeled as swap. Creating a regular 8GB partition does nothing. Not only that, your operating system must be configured to use that swap partition. If you're not aware of how to do this, it's best that you leave it out.
 
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3nter

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Apr 16, 2013
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Thank you for all your replies! I'll by another stick then:D
But this means i may be having more than just one problem, cus when playing Fallout NV, it lags as **** and it's just using 2gb of ram... Well i guess i'll just post a new thread in a different category then. Again thank you so much for yor replies!
 
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