SOLVED Basic newby memory question.

[Aardvarkly]

I am buying parts for a new build. My motherboard has four memory slots as pretty much all of them do these days. What are the pros and cons of buying one stick of say 16mb or splitting it into four sticks of 4mb? Apart from any difference in total price are there performance issues?

 

[TrainableMan]

What motherboard? It will all depend on the MOBO because it was common to require you buy in pairs. And for a while there were MOBOs made that had slots for two different memory chip technologies but you could only use one set of banks per machine; so you had 2 SDR slots & 2 DDR slots but you could only use one or the other. So start with the MOBO spec sheet, it will tell you how many, what type, & what speeds.

 

[Aardvarkly]

Its an Asus Prime H270Pro

All the manual says is "4 x Dimm, maximum 64gb, DDR4 2400/2133 Mhz non-ECC, unbuffered memory" Which doesn't tell me what I need to know.

 

[TrainableMan]

"64GB Dual Channel DDR4-2133"
So your max would be 4 sticks of 16gb each.

Dual channel means you would want to put in matching pairs for fastest processing. It is color coded so if you only use 2 DDR4 sticks then put them in matching color slots.

Operationally there should be next to no difference using 4 x 8gb vs 2 x 16gb as long as you put the pair in matching color slots. The difference will be in price now. Of course later if you decide to increase your memory if all 4 slots are full then you are tossing at least 2 sticks to go up.

 

[Aardvarkly]

I thank you. That answers my question. No operational difference. I have noted the importance of maintaining pairs in the correct slots.