okay so why does memory come with more than one stick in a kit what are these
channels everyone's always talking about find out everything you need to know
about RAM channels as fast as possible by watching this video When shopping for
computer memory there's all kinds of specs to pay attention to including the
frequency the timings the voltage and how many sticks actually come in the kit
and how many channels they're rated for you can usually tell by the little
number on the memory itself or on the box showing you how many pieces are
intended to be in the kit that's normally how many channels it's intended
to be operated in before you buy your memory you need to check your
motherboard or computer system to find out how many channels it supports the
easiest way to do this is the manual or the manufacturer website but failing
that you can check the labels on the motherboard itself or you can usually
tell by checking for colorcoded memory slots so they are normally coded with
all the same colors for how many sticks
you're supposed to populate at a time with one kit this particular board is a
quad Channel board which means it has four slots that are one color and four
slots that are another color that doesn't mean that you have to run quad
Channel kits in it it just means that that's what will yield the best
performance now A Memory kit is just a
bunch of individual memory sticks that are validated to work with each other
flawlessly in however many Channel operation it's rated for so in this case
a quad Channel kit could be reduced to a triple Channel kit or a dual Channel kit
just by taking memory sticks away because all those sticks are still
validated to work with each other normally that is to say that you could
normally take a quad Channel kit install all four sticks in a dual Channel
motherboard and it would operate in dual Channel with your full capacity full
performance and everything normally I said normally an awful lot of
times in that last shot there there's a reason for that this is a quad Channel
kit could I install it in a dual Channel board sure yes would it work probably
there are primary timings which the manufacturer tells you so so if it
doesn't detect correctly in your dual Channel board you could easily change
them around but there are actually more timings in fact some boards will give
you access to secondary and even tertiary timings on the memory that can
be optimized to work with a particular platform if the manufacturer sells you a
quad Channel kit they're expecting you to use it in an LGA 2011 board not an
1156 1155 or am3 board if you want to
run in dual Channel generally speaking buy a dual Channel kit if you want to
run in Quad Channel don't buy two dual Channel kits cuz they might work but
you're better off to buy a quad Channel kit cuz sometimes those optimizations
even though there's nothing wrong with the memory and nothing wrong with the board can cause stability issues and
they can be difficult to override and to diagnose now I'm not going to try and
convince you that if you mix and match your memory your system's going to
explode and it's not going to work at all cuz there's a good chance it actually will however if you're
populating your memory with unmatched sticks there is a chance that they won't
operate in dual Channel or triple Channel or quad Channel or whatever your
motherboard is rated for which can negatively impact your performance in
fact in this board right here I've got a triple Channel kit installed in a dual
Channel motherboard which can on some boards actually reduce the entire memory
bank to single Channel performance so if
you need the extra RAM capacity more than you need the bandwidth there can
still be a benefit to doing this but in most cases it's not ideal you're better
off to take one stick out or add another matching stick another example would be
a quad Channel motherboard with a single stick installed this example gives you
one qu of the total bandwidth that that CPU might need or that that motherboard
is capable of delivering so it's just not an optimal
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