Dual vs Quad channel memory

[Texx]

Can anyone clearly explain the obvious difference between dual and quad channel memory? My understanding is that if using 2 identical DIMMs the board will run in dual channel mode and when using 4 identical DIMMs it'll switch to quad channel mode.

It appears that memory kits are supplied as either dual or quad channel kits, some have 4 DIMMs in the kit but are still listed as dual channel kits?

I'm wanting to know if the memory, regardless as to whether it listed as dual or quad, will work in quad channel mode if I'm using 4 identical DIMM's in a quad channel motherdoard? or will I have to buy a memory kit that is specifically listed as a quad channel kit?

 

[GT-TD04]

There's single channel,dual channel,tri-channel and quad channel.

As for it working,it all depends on the motherboard chipset.

When you put in quad channel kit (4sticks) into a dual channel board,the mobo will run it in dual channel.

The likes of the socket LGA 1155 (i5/i7) can olny run dual channel,very few mobo's allow tri channel for instance,and quad is socket 2011 iirc

Normally you can use 4 dimms on a dual channel mobo as long as theres 4 dimm slots,but try to get them from the same batch (buying 4x2GB rather than 2 sets of 2x2GB) as there can be differences causing errors etc,easier to RMA aswell if there is a problem.

The differences between them is how much data they can relate to rest of the computer. Dual channel will allow twice the amount as theres two channels of information,tri allow 3 times the amount and quad 4 times the amount.

If you post up the make and model of your mobo and which site your using I can pick out the ram kits that will work if you'd like. I take it its an intel board using socket 2011 ?

 

[Texx]

That was sort of my thinking, that the quad channel kits are 4 DIMMs taken from the same batch so should in theory be as identical as they possibly could be.

So basically if I want to run the memory at quad channel speed it's best (from a compatibility and reliability point of view) to buy a quad channel kit rather than a couple of dual channel kits.


Any idea what G.Skill memory is like? They do several quad channel kits at a reasonable price but I can't find many reviews on the performance of their memory.

I'm looking at getting:

Intel Core i7-3820 3.60GHz (Sandybridge-E) Socket LGA2011
MSI X79A-GD45 (8D) Intel X79 (Socket 2011) Motherboard

With this memory kit:

G.Skill RipjawsZ 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 PC3-17000 C9 2133Mhz Quad Channel Kit

XMP Profile Version 1.3
Motherboard Chipset INTEL P67, INTEL X79
Package 16GB (4x4GB Kit)
CAS Latency 9-11-10-28 (PC3-17000)
Test Voltage 1.65v
Speed DDR3 2133MHz
Type 240-Pin DDR3
Error Checking Non-ECC
Registered/Unbuffered Unbuffered
Warranty Lifetime Warranty with G.Skill.

 

[Paul_JJ]

You've choosen a good PC. I wouldn't get i7 though as it's overpriced and you simply don't use all the resources. I've choosen i5 2500K which is easily overclocked and runs 4.5Ghz with out any voltage increase. Most of the applications would never load my CPU - 100%, I'm not even talking about i7 - it's good however if you do programming, video decoding and other CPU needed work. The thing is you can always upgrade the CPU and in 2-3 years time it will cost around 50% cheaper and by then more applications will support it and actually load all cores. Always buy the unlocked CPU - with K letter at the end.

Also getting Socket 2011 chipset is not worth it in my opinion, everything is so overpriced. I would rather invest in decent SSD. Also I wouldn't buy the MSI motherboard - look for Asus or at least Gigabyte, I had a few blown MSI motherboards.

You need to get a decent cooler - the one in the box - OEM is rubbish and noisy, get someting decent, if you can afford such pc, spend good deal of money on decent cooler - Noctua NH-D14 for example - the one I've got!

RAM - well this is very interesting topic. Most of it is marketing. You don't need quad channel, nor tripple channel. It cost an arm and leg and doesn't even give 10% difference compared to dual channel. G.Skill is a cheap memory, but it does the job, however the one you want to buy is highly overclocked (from the factory), with high timings (9-11-10-28). You need to undestand that new CPU's have inetegrated memory controllers and doesn't depend on memory as they used to before. Another words 1333Mhz CL7 - compared to 2133 Mhz would be less than 10% difference in performance - now look at the price -) Another thing is the higher the clock the more chances that the memory will have error, threfore resulting is repeating the same task twice or more. I've bought low profile Corsair 2000Mhz CL9 for myself and downclocked it to 1600Mhz but reduced the timings to CL7 - most ideal setup for Sandy Bridge with the fastest memory setup and lowest temperature/voltage.

The memory timings are very important and most of the people don't undestand it - I probably really confused you. Consider the memory frequency as the top speed of the car and all those CL (there're loads of them) as the amount of stops per road - this the delay and old DDR2 memory used to have very low delay time - like CL2 or CL4 for a reason, but to increase the speed the manufacturers come up with an idea to increase the timings(delay) at the same time, thus slowing down the memory - but who cares if for the marketing purposes it looks good and fast? My advise it to get memory with CL7 with the highest possible frequency and lowest possible voltage (1.5V), but no more than 8 Gb, no application at the moment using more than 8Gb of memory, you can always buy extra 2 modules (16Gb if you want) and make overall 24 Gb, but over time the memory will get cheaper.

Feel free to ask any question you have.

I build computers for people, been doing it for many years. Also I have a degree in IT.

 

[Texx]

What CPU and memory would you recommend? Apart from the usual, the PC is used mostly for 3D gaming.

I'm currently running:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ with a Zalman 9500 cooler - overclocked to 2.94GHz
4GB DDR2 PC2-5300
MSI GeForce GTX 570 Twin Frozr III Power Edition/OC 1280MB GDDR5

I'm intending to replace the motherboard, CPU, memory, case and also use an OCZ Agility 3 120GB SSD as the main system drive.

 

[GT-TD04]

i5 2500k is the best price V performance,coupled with the likes of the p67 sabertooth its very very good.

I use G.skill and never had a problem with it,although I've only used up to the 1600mhz kits.
I've used corsair in a few builds before and it turned out well.

i5 2500k
P67 Sabertooth

You can pick the ram of the memory qvl list -http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/SABERTOOTH_P67/#MSL

 

[Paul_JJ]

Here is what I would recommend for gaming for those who wants the best value for money, of course if you have more money then you can get more expensive say CPU or a Graphics card.

Asus P8Z68-V GEN3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard
Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail
Noctua NH-D14 Dual Radiator CPU Cooler (Socket LGA1366LGA1156LGA1155LGA775AM2AM2)
Corsair XMS3 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-16000C9 2000MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMX8GX3M2A2000C9)

The motherboard is very good and has support for new CPU's, PCIe-3 for new Grapchics Cards and SATA-3 for new SSD, oh yeah and USB3 as well.

Regarding the memory I went for this one because it was the best money for value and quite reputable manufacturer, not saying that it's the best memory, have a look yourself you might find something else and the price is keep changing on daily basis. Crucial makes very good memory as well in my opinion.

I have this OCZ SSD myself, but was disappointed with the speed as they announced around 500mb/s reading/writing speeds, but when testing I didn't see more than 408Mb/s, and that was on a completely empty drive (apart from OS), when I put around 50Gb on it the speed has dropped even more. But overall - good drive for the price!

I can put the speed graph if you want.

Also, please note for full SSD support you will need Windows 7 or later version of windows, as older versions doesn't support TRIM, which will reduce the speed of the drive over time.

The case - get anythng you like, the bigger the better (for the air flow) also if it has fans up front and on the back - even better, but not essential as you can just open the cover off to get the fresh air in. Make sure you buy at least 650Watt (better if 800Watt) PSU, modular and better if reputable manufacturer - Antec, Corsair, Zalman, Thermaltake, etc. I went for the Gigabyte GT myself, but they're not the cheapest and pretty rare - also they're not the best, but very good quality and have full control over your voltages and the fan controls.

Here is an example of a good case
http://www.dabs.com/products/gigaby...-2-front-fans-7YDY.html?q=gigabyte psu&src=16

Graphics card - most important part for games.

A lot of people recommend Nvidia, but with recent ATI developments and new 7K series card they've managed to provide decent performance for the good money. I would highly recommend new 7870 cards,

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-157-PC&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=411
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-153-MS&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=411

Get one card for a start, you will be able to overclock it and get very very good performance, after a year or 2 you can buy a second card and make them in crossfire. These cards made on new 28 nm design which gives excellent overclocking/low power consumption and low noise.

Alternatively, if you don't want to spend so much money on the card and still get a good performance get 6950 and flash the bios to 6970.

http://www.hwcompare.com/12208/geforce-gtx-570-vs-radeon-hd-7870/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5625/...-hd-7850-review-rounding-out-southern-islands

 

[Paul_JJ]

i5 2500k is the best price V performance,coupled with the likes of the p67 sabertooth its very very good.

I use G.skill and never had a problem with it,although I've only used up to the 1600mhz kits.
I've used corsair in a few builds before and it turned out well.

i5 2500k
P67 Sabertooth

You can pick the ram of the memory qvl list -http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/SABERTOOTH_P67/#MSL

P67 doesn't support new CPU's from Intel (no Ivy Bridge support), it's pretty old now, but good value for money indeed.

 

[GT-TD04]

P67 doesn't support new CPU's from Intel (no Ivy Bridge support), it's pretty old now, but good value for money indeed.

True if your planning to upgrade,but with the latest figures,for the same money you'd spend on the ivy cpu it'd be more of a sidegrade imo
Personally I'm waiting for the next line of intel cpu's before I switch from AMD and probably siwtch out my 6870's for 7870's but the 580's are looking very tempting now with the recent price cut

 

[Paul_JJ]

True if your planning to upgrade,but with the latest figures,for the same money you'd spend on the ivy cpu it'd be more of a sidegrade imo
Personally I'm waiting for the next line of intel cpu's before I switch from AMD and probably siwtch out my 6870's for 7870's but the 580's are looking very tempting now with the recent price cut

No point buying new i7 just yet, stick an i5 2500K overclock it and be happy! When the time will come and the price of the new i7 will go down, then you can always replace just the CPU.

7870 is really good, when overclocked it's a beast, eventually the price will drop as well and it will be under £200. The thing is you can crossfire it easily and don't need a massive PSU, where is to SLI 580 you will need 1KWatt+ PSU (not to mention SLI motherboard Support).

 

[Texx]

Feel free to ask any question you have.

This is where I'm currently at, just wondered what your thoughts are before I hit the buy button:

• ASUS P8Z77-M PRO Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) Motherboard
• 3rd Generation Intel® Core™ i5 3570K 3.40GHz Socket LGA1155 - Retail.
• Corsair Vengeance Blue LP 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800 C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit
• Noctua NH-D14 Dual Radiator and Fan CPU Cooler
• Western Digital Caviar Green Power 2TB 64MB Cache Hard Disk Drive 6Gb/s - OEM
• Corsair Force Series 3 120GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD - Retail
• Sharkoon T9 Value Gaming Case Black with Green LED Fans - (No PSU)
• Pioneer DVR-S19LBK 24x DVD+/-RW LabelFlash SATA Black - Retail

I'm currently running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, will Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit do the job just as well or am I likely to regret the downgrade?

 

[Paul_JJ]

Good CPU and MOBO choice, cooler is awesome as well.

Memory is OK.

Hard Drive - I personally stay away from WD after waiting for 2 months for the warranty replacement and they sent me a used one (scratched on top), not brand new. I would recommend Samsung but they sold their Hard Drive department to Seagate -( Hard Drive is the most unreliable part of the PC by the way -)

Definitely get a Blue Ray drive - not much of a price difference, but well worth it. Pioneer is pretty good for the price, Lite-on is a good make as well, cheap one, but reliable.
You missed the PSU and I would recommend this one
http://www.dabs.com/products/corsair-850w-corsair-modular-psu-5KBN.html?refs=50113&q=psu&src=16

DO you plan to buy Windows 7 for a full price?

 

[Texx]

Hard Drive - I personally stay away from WD after waiting for 2 months for the warranty replacement and they sent me a used one (scratched on top), not brand new. I would recommend Samsung but they sold their Hard Drive department to Seagate -( Hard Drive is the most unreliable part of the PC by the way -)

I've had many WD drives over the years and never had any issues, the SATA-2 drive I'm currently using has been there for over 5 years and caused me no problems what so ever. I vowed many years ago never to buy another Seagate drive and TBH that's unlikely to change, far too many bad experiences with Seagate. The drive is only for temporary local storage, I've also got a Netgear NAS server running 3 x 4TB Hitachi drives in RAID 5 for main storage and backup.

Definitely get a Blue Ray drive - not much of a price difference, but well worth it. Pioneer is pretty good for the price, Lite-on is a good make as well, cheap one, but reliable.

TBH I'm only replacing my current LG DVD writer because it's IDE, so just looking for a SATA drive to install the OS and other software and maybe burn the occasional CD or DVD.

You missed the PSU and I would recommend this one
http://www.dabs.com/products/corsair-850w-corsair-modular-psu-5KBN.html?refs=50113&q=psu&src=16

I'm currently using an 80+ Cert OCZ 600W Modular PSU, it's only about 2 months old. My plan is to reuse the PSU and swap it out if it causes any issues.

DO you plan to buy Windows 7 for a full price?

Will get an OEM version, Home Premium is around £79 and Pro is about £118. From what I can tell the only real benefit with Pro is that it comes with some wizard to make Domain connections easier to setup and Ultimate has the Bitlocker function, both of which I'm highly unlikely to use.

 

[Paul_JJ]

When it comes to the hard drive is more like a lottery.

If you know anyone who is a student you can get win 7 pretty cheap, I will provide the link later.

Also just to let you know that new i7 CPU's only support LGA 2011
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=6&subid=1672

So the only upgrade you could possibly do on 1155 is I7-2600K.

 

[Paul_JJ]

http://www.software4students.co.uk/Windows_7-software.aspx

600W is perfectly fine for your setup, just don't go for a crossfire setup till you replace the PSU.

Regarding the hard drive, it's your money and your choice, it's just my personal preference that's it. If you prefer WD stick to it, and you might get lucky and don't have any problems with it. I don't like the Seagate very much either, never did! The only advise here I could provide is to get a 120mm low noise fan (better if 4 pin) and put it directly next to the hard drive to cool it down, this way it should last longer.

I know that a lot of people vouch for WD, some people love Seagate, even Hitachi (used to be IBM) can be good, but no matter who is the manufacturer they can fail anytime.


Here is thread about the hard drives reliabilty, so you could understand that nobody is right or wrong, everyone had their personal experiences some people had bad some people had good.

http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/28230-most-reliable-hard-drive/

As others have mentioned, you cant really measure reliability, as all drives are not subject to the same environment and conditions by the end user, and there could very very well be some manufacturing defects thrown into the batter of harddrives.

I have been running Hitachi's for years, I have only had one drive go out on me. And that was my fault. I was using my 15K300 outside of its enclosure. I had a fan going to keep it cool. I bumped into the table, and the fan grille shorted out the circuit board
My laptop has one in there, and I have 10,900hours on it without a problem.
I have had troubles with Western Digital in the past, and problems with Seagate in the present.
The only companies which I havent had any problems at all with are Fujitsu and Samsung, but that could be because my sampling of drives from either is small.
The longest drive I have ran is a Fujitsu 15K enterprise drive, which has been going for 9 years strong.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/264097-14-samsung-hard-drives-good

Over the years I have had numerous hard drives and my personal experience tells me that Western Digital is the worst brand for hard drives. I can't believe how many times I had Western Digital and they all dead sooner or later. Western Digital is definitely not the hard drive brand that I will ever buy again.

 

[Rev]

If you look at the sustained transfer rates and seek times for a given number of platters and size you can see how hard the drive heads are working, a drive that doesn't do any work may last longer. I have an older western digital because you couldn't beat it for speed at the time and it is still going strong.

Last week I bought a WD 2T backup for the tv . I worked it hard fast forwarding several times through most of the grand prix it failed in 2 hours. The replacement WD drive is now working fine.

 

[Paul_JJ]

Thanks John for your input.

Let's hope that Terry will not take it personal and will understand my point of view.

 

[Paul_JJ]

Recent review showed that new Intel CPU's are not very good for overclocking and run hotter than Sandy Bridge ones. However they're more economical 77Watt TDP istead of 95W Sandy Bridge. I personally don't see any reason of buying i7 for games as it would not make any difference.

 

[Texx]

Opted for an older 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 in the end, it's only a SATAII-300 drive but with only 2 500GB platters and plenty of good reviews it should perform well enough for what I need.

Ended up with a Noctua NH-C12P cooler as the NH-D14 was out of stock at the time of ordering, though I'm not so bothered about overclocking the CPU as long as performs well enough out of the box.

 

[Paul_JJ]

Opted for an older 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 in the end, it's only a SATAII-300 drive but with only 2 500GB platters and plenty of good reviews it should perform well enough for what I need.

Ended up with a Noctua NH-C12P cooler as the NH-D14 was out of stock at the time of ordering, though I'm not so bothered about overclocking the CPU as long as performs well enough out of the box.

Terry, Sata2, or Sata3 or Sata1 would not make any difference to the bandwith transfer of the Hard Disc Drive -) For SSD yes it's important, for HDD no it's not -) As even Sata1 which was introduced in 2004 as far as I remember, has a bandwith of 150mbit/s where is any of the current hard drive below that figure -) Another words it wouldn't make any difference at all if you HDD has Sata1, 2 or 3.

So what's the full PC specs in the end? Also where did you buy it?

I'm currently replacing one of my Samsungs hard drives under the warranty, it didn't fail, it's just slowed down (10-30mbp/s), and I was able to recover all the info, as it has 3 years warranty I replaced it, but as the Samsung sold their HDD department to a Seagate I had to send the hdd to a seagate, well it looks like I will be getting a Seagate replacement made in Korea, another words Samsung still makes hard drives but they have Seagate label on top of them. I will get some pics once I receive it.

On personal experience, when I was a PC shop manager for a few years I dealt with faulty hardware, we had just 1 failed Samsung hard drive and around 400 of failed hdd's of other makes, I was well impressed with that, not to mention that at that time it was the only company to give 3 years warranty for their hard discs.

I was on an international Samsung conference and saw the hardware they make, and how they make it, also saw hard drives in operation, made of glass so you can see through, to be honest I was well impressed with them and their quality builds, not to mention that after the conference Samsung paid for a party, which included restaraunt made food and a lot of really expensive drinks at the bar, everything completely free of charge, one of the best experieces I had in my life!

Regarding the overclocking you can up the clocs to 4.2Ghz safely, you don't even need to up the voltage or anything else, either way Asus now has overclocking option build in to Bios, where all your have to do is click a button, wait for some time and it will overclock and up the voltage if necessary for you fully automatically. As long as the CPU has sufficient cooling you're not damaging it!