Dual Channeling ... useful?

[Solid Snake]

I was reading an article about this thing and it totally lost me. Anyways, from what I read, memory at 166 FSB is already providing memory bandwidth of X amount, and from what I recall it is already more than the CPU can actually use. So if you use dual channeling to increase the bandwidth, that would be a waste of money ... right?

So theoritically would using Dual Channeling with a FSB of 200+ FSB be the beneficial way to use Dual Channel to it's maximum?

[mird-OC]

what you're saying is true on the EV6 bus... there is small theoretical gain in running dual channel on such a bus as it allows reading and writing at the same time. there is even a possibility of decreased performance due to an increase in latency.

on the P4 it's a totally different story... dual channel finally allows DDR to use the entire gaping memory pipeline of the P4. as such you can run two sticks of P2100 and achieve around 4GB/sec bandwidth. easy peasy lemon squeezey. which is why i'm about to sit my bum in a nice new SiS655 board.

[Deviant]

Originally posted by Solid Snake
So theoritically would using Dual Channeling with a FSB of 200+ FSB be the beneficial way to use Dual Channel to it's maximum?

No, because at 200MHz FSB, the CPU has more bandwidth, and the RAM running synchronously increases proportunately.

There is a small 4-5% increase by having dual channel enabled, and that is the case with my mobo, but some apps there is no difference.

[Solid Snake]

So anyone buying Corsair TwinX Dual Channeling ram and saying it is much more superior cos they have much more bandwidth is just playing the ol' wank factor card?

[mird-OC]

in an athlon/duron system, yeah pretty much.

[ExtremE]

Plus i have seen alot of ppl trying to overclock there pcs in dual channel, and cant get past 166
then they take it out of dual channel and reach 200+ nps
but then there is alot of ppl that can o/c in dual channel guess its just quality:confused:

[Grrr!!]

Realistically it has no real use, except when using it for onboard video (leading to a nil performance loss on the memory side of things) ... I tried this with mine.

One interesting thing though,

When running in dual channel, you can chuck your CPU FSB up higher then the memory.

For instance, I can run my CPU at 180, and have the memory running at 133, and have a nil performance loss. Technically I could chuck it down to 90 as fat as I can see. So if you can manage to chuck your FSB well over 200, you don't really need to worry about your memory limiting the overclock :).

I'm using dual muskin btw.

[Solid Snake]

Mmm, interesting...