Dual Channel DDR boards

Dom

How do Dual Channel DDR boards fair against regular DDR boards? Is there a BIG difference? Are they worth it?

Necrosis

Their quite faster especially if your processor can make use of the increased bandwidth like your P4.

craig588

Well the ram has twice the bandwidth, so however fast your ram is now it will be twice as fast in a dual channel board, unless you one have one stick of ram in that case you wont notice a difference.

Dom

Does Dual Channel DDR work better w/ P4's or AMD's? i.e. a P4 2.4B or a Athlon XP 2600 333FSB?

Necrosis

Hmm... I hate to say this but P4 has the advantage. The Athlons are setup to only access so much bandwidth. However, the Athlons do have some benefit from more memory bandwidth. Take the nforce2 boards for example.

DaSnIpE

Yep, in general, more bandwith is better, so supply it with whatever it needs

Matth

ISTR that for the Nforce and Nforce 2 chipsets (for AMD)

The most telling improvement with Dual-DDR was on the onboard graphics - logic also dictates that Dual-DDR would be required for full memory to AGP 8x bandwidth to be achieved.

Small improvemants were noted otherwise, but as the CPU itself only has a single DDR interface to the rest of the syatem, the most that dual-DDR can achieve in that respect is a bit of optimized prefetch.

Despite many saying that the Nforce 2 is NOT good with non-synchronous RAM/CPU. One test rated Dual-DDR (at 400 RAM, 333 CPU) above synchronous 333 working.

reno

Using PC2100 ddr memory in dual channel mode on a P4 granite bay, it's almost exactly as fast as PC1066 rambus. Which is cool, because DDR is cheaper...especially 2100.

Necrosis

So what would PC3200 do on a Granite Bay board??? Is there any reviews or test on the web for this?

Vampyromaniac

I don't think anyone has these boards done yet

Dom

no Granite Bay boards support PC3200 yet.

Dom

Intel is planing to release boards that support dual-channel DDR400 in mid-2003. They will be less expensive then the current dual-channel DDR266 boards, because they will be 4-layer instead of the current 6-layer.