Why memory does come with more than one stick in a kit? What are those channels everyone is always talking about? Find out everything you need to know about RAM channels in this post.
When shopping for computer memory, there are all kinds of specs to pay attention to including the frequency, the timings, the voltage, and how many sticks actually come in the kit and how many channels it is rated for. You can usually tell by the little number on the memory itself or on the box showing you how many pieces are intended to be in the kit. That is normally how many channels it is intended to be operated on.
Before you buy your memory, you need to check your motherboard or computer system to find out how many channels it supports. The easiest way to do this is the manual or the manufacturer website, but failing that, you can check the labels on the motherboard itself or you can usually tell by checking for color-coded memory slots.
Therefore, they are normally coated with all the same colors for how many sticks you are supposed to populate at a time with one kit. This particular board is a quad channel board, which means it has four slots with one color and four slots with another color. That does not mean that you have to run quad channel kits, it just means that this is what will yield the best performance.
Now a memory kit is just a bunch of individual memory sticks that are validated to work with each other flawlessly in however many channel operation it is rated for. Therefore, in this case, a quad channel kit could be reduced to a triple channel kit or a dual channel kit just by taking memory sticks away because all those sticks are still validated to work with each other.
Normally, that is to say that you could normally take a quad channel kit, install all four sticks in a dual channel motherboard and it would operate in dual-channel with your full capacity, and full performance, and everything.
This is a quad channel kit. can I install it in a dual channel board? Yes! Would it work? Probably! there are primary timings which the manufacturer tells you, so if it doesn't detects correctly in your dual channel board, you could easily change them around, but there are actually more timings, in fact some boards will give you access to secondary and even tertiary timings on the memory that can be optimized to work with a particular platform. If the manufacturer sells you a quad channel kit, they are expecting you to use it in LGA 2011 board, not at 1156 or 1155, or AM3 board.
If you want to run into a dual channel, buy a dual channel kit. If you want to run a quad channel, don't buy two dual channel kits because they might work but you're better off to buy quad channel kits because sometimes those optimizations, even though there's nothing wrong with the memory and nothing wrong with the board, can cause stability issues and they can be difficult to override and to diagnose.
Now I am not going to try to convince you that if you mix and match a memory, your system is going to explode or it is not going to work at all because there is a good chance it actually will. However, if you are populating your memory with unmatched sticks, there is a chance that they will not operate in dual-channel, triple channel, or quad channel, or whatever your motherboard is rated for, which can negatively affect your performance. In fact, in my motherboard right now, I have got a triple channel kit installed in a dual channel motherboard, which can on some boards actually reduced the entire memory bank to single channel performance. If you need the extra RAM capacity more than you need the bandwidth, there can still be a benefit to doing this but in most cases it's not ideal. You are better off to take one stick out or adding another matching stick.
Another example would be a quad channel motherboard with a single stick installed. This example gives you one-quarter of the total bandwidth that the CPU might need or that that motherboard is capable of delivering. It is just not an optimal configuration.
