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
It means that you can read and write to both ram sticks at the same time, in ELI5 terms.
If you only have a single channel architecture then you can only read and write data to a single stick of ram at any given time, dual channel means you can read and write to 2, quad channel means 4, six channel means 6, eight channel means 8, triple channel means 3…
Regarding performance improvements, during gaming benchmarking there was a negligible improvement and the reason is that very rarely do you need to use so much memory in the first place so it usually is all contained on a single chip. For processes with high memory demand (like say rendering a 3d animation) it can offer more improvements at times but won’t necessarily provide a detectable improvement.
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