One or Two Sticks?

[strudey]

Hi. Wonder if you guys could help me; I recently found out that my motherboard (an ASRock P4VM800 mATX) only supports PC3200 on one of its two memory slots; so I'm currently running two sticks of 512Mb at PC2700.

My question is, would I get better performance in games + windows with two sticks of 1Gb Ram @ PC2700, or would just one PC3200 1Gb stick be better? Or is it possible for two sticks to run at different speeds? Thankyou in advance!

 

[Firegod]

Two sets of memory is always best as it enables dual channel (if available on the mobo) to give a performance increase as well. So if you were wanting PC3200 memory then it should be in the form of 2x512Mb Dimms.

It is possible to run different speeds of RAM in the mobo, the quickest will simply slow down the slowest dimm. i.e. if you had PC3200+PC2700 then the PC3200 will clock down to the 333Mhz instead of 400Mhz.

P4's love bandwidth, so you should notice an increase when going to PC3200.