A Memory Conundrum...

English Hardware
#1

I have an interesting delimma. It is as follows:

  • My motherboard has 4 RAM slots. It supports DDR2 800 and 1066.
  • I have 6 sticks of memory: 4x 1GB DDR2800, 2x 2GB DDR2 1066.

What is better for performance - more or faster?
I currently have 6GB installed running at 800 Mhz. Works nicely.
BUT: should I remove 2 sticks and run 4GB at 1066? I rarely use swap space with 4GB.

So really, it boils down to whether 1066 is really that much better performance wise than 800Mhz. Google shows the consensus answer to be “no” but I’d like to hear from you guys.

#2

Unless you’re running extremely memory intensive applications there isn’t much difference between those two speeds. Probably not even noticeable to the average user.

I would say just stick with the 6 GB of Ram. The increase in speed you would see (or most likely not see) isn’t worth the time pulling the RAM out.

#3

I have an interesting delimma. It is as follows:

  • My motherboard has 4 RAM slots. It supports DDR2 800 and 1066.
  • I have 6 sticks of memory: 4x 1GB DDR2800, 2x 2GB DDR2 1066.

What is better for performance - more or faster?
I currently have 6GB installed running at 800 Mhz. Works nicely.
BUT: should I remove 2 sticks and run 4GB at 1066? I rarely use swap space with 4GB.

So really, it boils down to whether 1066 is really that much better performance wise than 800Mhz. Google shows the consensus answer to be “no” but I’d like to hear from you guys.
VintagePC I am not sure there is a definitive answer for you as it depends on what tasks you normally use. I will say that most likely 9 out of 10 users could not determine a difference between a PC running Linux having 4 GB of memory compared with one with 6 GB of memory. Further, I have seen issues where the system would slow down if you attempted to run your memory at a speed faster than the default. So, how would I determine what was best? I would compile a kernel file, from scratch, using both configurations. The faster one wins the pot, so to speak. You can download kernel 2.6.37.2 from here:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.37.2.tar.bz2

And, you can get the SAKC bash kernel compiler here, see message #17:

S.A.K.C. - SUSE Automated Kernel Compiler - Version 2.00

So, if you decide to compile it twice, don’t forget to remove the compile folder the second time around. Message #22 in the same SAKC thread has a bash script called KLIST that can help manage these kernels. Good luck and please tell us of your results. Please be very ccareful when installing and removing memory modules. We do not want any casualties here. If there were no difference, then the answer is 4 GB as it saves energy and reduces heat in your PC.

Thank You,

#4

Hey there,

My best suggestion would be to benchmark both configurations using a tool like: Phoronix Test Suite - Download

You can run memory specific, computational or I/O based tests and get very detailed output and comparisons.

Cheers,
Lews Therin

#5

Hm… good suggestion. I also found a benchmark testing just 800Mhz vs 1066Mhz… No appreciable difference really. (and that’s with a special benchmark program.)… so as said before, the day-to-day is probably minimal.

I’ll definitely try the kernel “benchmark” in the future… but I’m upgrading my CPU first (C2D → C2Q - got the Quad for free from a friend who’s box was trashed in a shiping incident. Hope it works, but I’m not about to swap it until I no longer need my desktop for my comp Sci assignments!!). :smiley: