1 or 2 sticks of RAM?

[allgoodpeople]

I'm soon building a system, and am planning on putting in 256 MB RAM. Would i be better off buying 2 sticks of 128 MB, or 1 stick of 256 MB? My thinking is that having 2 sticks offers some insurance against accidents, so that if one breaks for whatever reason, i at least still have the other 128 MB stick. But i don't know if there's a performance issue with using 2 vs. 1 stick.


allgoodpeople




"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing milkbone underwear."

 

[toonces]

i would reccommend 1 stick of 256 for a couple of reasons.

1. ram rarely breaks or goes bad. that's why most co.'s offer lifetime warranties on them. i'm not sure of what kind of accidents you're thinking might happen but i don't think you have anything to worry about.

2. if you want to uprgade in the future (which you probably will) you will need more open ram slots. if you've got 2 128mg chips that only leaves you with one open, but if you only have 1 256mg chip...

3. there really is no discernable performance difference between the two setups.

<font color=red>yeah baby, my kung fu's the best...</font color=red>

 

[Guest]

agreed
256 on 1 stick MUST HAPPEN
Trust me - placing an order on dabs soon.

PC133 (GOD I HOPE YOUR USING A 133MHZ BUS) as the performance is quite good.

Dont go for generic - sent many sticks back. Watford and Dabs stopped selling as it was so unreliable. Viking and Crucial seem to be the best choices (that are readily available anyway).

Do a test on your memory (see BIOS Manual)

It will save you the 29 reformats and reinstalls it took me until a friend figured it out - memory fault

Had my geek code on sig but lost it. Mail me for it if you like.

 

[Guest]

I agree as well.
Just curious, which part of the world do you live in?
In Hong Kong, you can barely find Crucial or Viking RAM, so our market is dominated by IBM, NEC, Hitachi etc. brands of RAM. Wonder if each part of the world sells it's own brands of RAM.