6gb dual channel DDR3?

[eunuco]

Hello

I bought two packs of 4gb dual channel Gskill ddr3 ram but lost one of the sticks. I am wondering if it would be worth to get a replacement for the missing stick in order to have the original 8gb installed because right know I am running with only 3 sticks. From what I understand if I wanted to have 6gb of ram I should have gotten triple channel sticks.

My mobo is and Asus p6t running with a intel i7 960 processor. Am I losing speed or power by using the 3 sticks?

Hope someone can enlighten me on this.

 

[treefrog07]

Assuming the two packs were the same model, you are fine. You should be using 3 or 6 sticks for best triple channel performance. The RAM mfrs sell triple packs for boards like yours, so people don't have to buy two dual packs and then leave the fourth stick out of the build.

 

[geofelt]

You are running at optimum speed with three sticks which will give you triple channel mode.

The nehalem cpu memory controllers are very good. Even if you were reduced to single or double channel mode, you would not observe any real performance degradation. Perhaps 2-3%. It would take synthetic memory benchmarks to tell the difference.

If your usage is gaming, then the 6gb is more than you can use. If you are a heavy multitasker, run many virtual machines, or have a program like photoshop, then added ram can be good. Then, why stop short, get another 6gb or 12gb kit.

 

[eunuco]

Thanks for the responses, I actually do use heavy apps like Photoshop so I think the upgrade would be a good idea. I've been using 8gb ddr2 sticks on my previous build and the performance is very similar.

What I don't have clear is if I buy another bundle of 4gb I would still have to buy the extra stick to replace the one I lost since I would end with 10 gb.

 

[geofelt]

Thanks for the responses, I actually do use heavy apps like Photoshop so I think the upgrade would be a good idea. I've been using 8gb ddr2 sticks on my previous build and the performance is very similar.

What I don't have clear is if I buy another bundle of 4gb I would still have to buy the extra stick to replace the one I lost since I would end with 10 gb.

Why not get a 6gb kit made up of 3 x 2gb? Or, a 12gb kit of 3 x 4gb? It is my understanding that photoshop cs4 responds well to all the ram you can get. Just make certain that the extra ram has the same specs as the original. That means same voltage, speed and latencies. If there is a mismatch, the ram should operate at the lowest common denominator of specs. That is not all bad, more ram trumps specs.