I recently found out that I had my 2 RAM sticks in apparently a ‘wrong position’ (side-by-side).
Someone pointed out that they needed to be placed in alternate slots.
I read my motherboard manual, I tried doing as much research as possible about this but all I got from that is that the alternate placement puts the RAM in ‘dual-channel’ mode and is somehow better.
I haven’t got any clear-cut/simple explanations as to WHAT ‘dual-channel memory’ means or WHY it’s better.
Someone please ELI5.
In: Technology
Imagine you have a room with two narrows flies of stairs with two blackboards behind them. One with maths tasks written on it and an empty one.
These tasks are too hard for you to solve but you have a disabled friend who is very good at maths and loves to solve these kinds of tasks.
Unfortunately they can’t get up from their wheelchair and you can’t see the tasks from the bottom of the stairs. Carrying them up the stairs isn’t possible either because they’re so narrow.
Your disabled friend would really like to solve these tasks though and would also like you to write their solutions onto the other board.
An easy solution is that you walk up to the first board, memorize a task, go back down, recite it to your friend and they then solve it. After they solved it they tell you their solution and you go to the other board to write it down.
That process obviously takes a bit of time but your friend wants to hear many many more math puzzles as fast as possible. You could try to run faster (clock speed), memorize faster, recite faster and write down faster (timings) but there’s a limit to how fast you can do these things without tripping or making errors (crashes, memory errors).
What could be done to speed this process up even further now? You call a second friend to help you out.
The stairs are very narrow of course which means only one of you can get up to each blackboard at a time, so you split the work; you memorize math tasks and the second friend writes down the solutions your disabled friend tells them.
This way you’d already be on your way to pick up the next question while your disabled friend is still telling your second friend what solution they should write down and while you’re reciting the math question to your disabled friend, your second friend is writing down the answer to the previous one which makes the whole process faster.
However some of the tasks are more complex and you can only memorize parts of them each run which means you sometimes have to run multiple times before your disabled friend has the full task to solve. The second friend can’t help much in those cases because they have to wait for you to give the disabled friend the whole tasks before they can solve it and tell the second friend who then goes to write down the solutions.
Having the two RAM sticks configured in dual channel mode is like calling over the second friend.
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