Tri Vs Dual

pwsymonds

pwsymonds

pwsymonds

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I tried my best looking for a good article on Tri-Channel Vs Dual channel ram but im finding it hard....

I thought what better than to get opinions from the members of the best PC forum in the galaxy.

Could anyone perhaps link me to a nice article or let me know your opinions?

What would make getting tri channel memory worth it over dual channel?
 
From what I have read there really is not much difference. I might be wrong on this as well but I thought a read the other day that the new intel digs coming next year will go back to dual channel but could be wrong.
 
I've never seen any benches where there's any difference at all - basically, dual channel is not a performance bottleneck. But if you have/want an i7 9xx, then tripple channel is pretty much a 'may as well, why not' decision.
 
Intel Core i7 Memory Analysis – Can Dual Channel Cut it?
TweakTown Nov 24, 2008

intelcorei7memoryanalys.jpg
 
Interesting - so memory bandwidth measuring tests can obviously measure the difference, as you'd expect, but in actual real world tasks, there's naff all difference to write home about.

Conclusions of those articles to save reading...

One of the biggest things that everyone has been looking forward to with Core i7 was the removal of the aging and antiquated FSB, allowing the CPU to finally live up to its potential. And the integration of the memory controller onto the CPU was the biggest leap forward in performance of all. However, Intel really didn’t need to worry about a triple channel memory controller at this stage.


We have seen today that dual channel memory on the Core i7 is more than enough to keep it fed with bandwidth, especially since the CPU and memory are communicating with each other directly. There is very little lost bandwidth and it makes better use of all of the dual channel memory than the triple channel memory. However, with Intel’s plans to increase speeds and allow heavier memory usage, especially with IGP based systems, the extra bandwidth will end up being welcomed.


Our moral to this story is if you’re planning on a Core i7 system, don’t just go out and buy triple channel memory straight away. If your budget allows for it, then by all means more memory will help, especially in Vista. However, with today’s results you can see that dual channel memory is more than capable of keeping up with the Core i7.
Click to expand...

Conclusion

After all these tests you need to ask yourself: What the heck is that triple channel mode useful for anyway, when it is obvious that is doesn’t provide performance boost that is expected? Maybe in the future and with some new versions of memory controllers, triple channel mode will provide better performances so transition to this platform will make more sense. Until that moment triple channel mode will be just another nice sticker on LGA 1366 motherboards and memory packages. Of course memory manufacturers already have triple channel DDR3 kits that are intended to be used on Intel Core i7 platform. Since these are triple channel kits they have three DDR3 modules with total capacity of 3GB or 6GB. Since prices for DDR3 memory are still pretty high it is obvious who will profit the most from this situation where (uninformed) users will go for triple channel kits with intention to use up potentials of their new platform.
Click to expand...
 
If you have LGA 1366 you get triple channel RAM, if you have anything else you get dual channel. Surely there's nothing else to think about?

I wish RAM was as cheap as it was 18 months ago, another 12 GB for £150 would do me nicely since I've started doing more video & audio editing. :/
 
That wouldn't make life simpler, that would require Intel not using such ridiculously complicated CPU naming schemes that aren't even consistent for their socket type, lol.
 
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