Should I purchase paired or unpaired DIMMs?

[darnoc]

I am in the market for some new DDR-RAM and have been wondering if it is worth the additional cost to purchase paired 512MB DIMMs or if I would be fine purchasing two individual chips. Is there going to be much of a difference in quality, speed or performance? Right now you can purchase Kingston HyperX 512MB PC4000 DDR DIMM Memory from Best Buy for $99 after a $15 mail-in rebate. This is the best price I've found this memory for and would like to take advantage of this offer. But because this memory isn't sold in a paired configuration I'd be looking at purchasing two DIMMs in order to get a total of 1GB of system memory. So I'd like to know what benefits and what downsides there are to buying or not buying paired DIMMs. Look foward to your responses.

Thank you,
Conrad

 

[Crashman]

Well, matched pairs are tested in pairs, which means they're less likely to crap out in dual channel mode. Fact is, a lot of RAM is so close to the edge of stability in single channel mode that adding dual channel overstresses it.

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[jonbach]

It depends on who brand you get. With most manufacturers, they do not specifically test those sticks together -- the "dual channel" memory is simply packaged together, giving you assurance that they came from the same manufacturing batch. If you buy two individual sticks at the same time from the same place, you will most likely get the exact same stuff....but yes, there is a chance that one stick will be from a March batch, another from a Feb batch. A few manufacturers (OCZ is one) will actually test each and every stick...you just have to know which manufacturers do that!

Jon Bach
Puget Custom Computers
<A HREF="http://www.pugetsystems.com" target="_new">http://www.pugetsystems.com</A>