dual channel motherboard

shaun mcintosh · 8 Oct 2020 at 02:44

i just bought an asus maximus xii hero mother board, it is dual channel but has four slots for the ram ?#

am i right in saying the dual Chanel is 1 channel is equal to 2 stick of ram and dual is the 4 slots full ?

im new to building pcs and just wondering wither its worth the 4 x 8 or just 2 x 16 for my mobo.

Dg834man · 8 Oct 2020 at 04:26

Two or four sticks will run dual channel

shaun mcintosh · 8 Oct 2020 at 05:14

Dg834man said:
Two or four sticks will run dual channel

I'm just flung off by the dual channel and 4 ram slots messed with my head

LeMson · 8 Oct 2020 at 06:17

shaun mcintosh said:
I'm just flung off by the dual channel and 4 ram slots messed with my head

Have a think about 3 sticks then

Slinky69 · 8 Oct 2020 at 10:53

LeMson said:
Have a think about 3 sticks then

Boom!

Dg834man · 8 Oct 2020 at 22:49

i do have 3 sticks but mine is an ancient x58 with triple channel

Space Monkey · 9 Oct 2020 at 01:00

shaun mcintosh said:
i just bought an asus maximus xii hero mother board, it is dual channel but has four slots for the ram ?#

am i right in saying the dual Chanel is 1 channel is equal to 2 stick of ram and dual is the 4 slots full ?

im new to building pcs and just wondering wither its worth the 4 x 8 or just 2 x 16 for my mobo.

It's the way the motherboard addresses the RAM, so to run dual channel you either need 2 sticks of RAM or 4.

Sticks 1 & 2 will go into slots 2&4 or 1&3 (so theres a gap between them, check the motherboard manual to see which you need to use to activate dual channel?)

So if you get a 16GB memory kit, which has 2x8GB that will run as dual channel, if you later decide to buy another of the same kit so you now have 4 x 8GB sticks it'll still be dual channel, as it'll count 1&3 together & 2&4 together so dual channel.

If it was Quad Channel then it'll use all 4 sticks together.

This is a very simplistic view but hopefully give you a better idea?

shaun mcintosh · 9 Oct 2020 at 01:26

Space Monkey said:
It's the way the motherboard addresses the RAM, so to run dual channel you either need 2 sticks of RAM or 4.

Sticks 1 & 2 will go into slots 2&4 or 1&3 (so theres a gap between them, check the motherboard manual to see which you need to use to activate dual channel?)

So if you get a 16GB memory kit, which has 2x8GB that will run as dual channel, if you later decide to buy another of the same kit so you now have 4 x 8GB sticks it'll still be dual channel, as it'll count 1&3 together & 2&4 together so dual channel.

If it was Quad Channel then it'll use all 4 sticks together.

This is a very simplistic view but hopefully give you a better idea?

Mate thats spot on easy enough to understand i did think that was kind of the case knowing that 2 stick would run as 1 channel. Appreciate the help mate