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I have a Dell Dimension 8300 that is still trucking along. A while ago I had ugpraded to 2x1GB in it. Over the weekend, one of the modules died, so I went and bought another 2x1GB (to run in matched pairs). I have noticed from time to time that memory heavy applications (GIMP, etC) do get a little bogged down with only 2GB of RAM. My question is, am I better off pulling the 'odd' module, so the system will only have a matched pair, or leaving the odd module in, and having 3GB (instead of 2GB) of RAM?
No definite answer for this one without doing a lot of benchmarking, determining what your bottleneck is, your use pattern, etc. Generally speaking though, if you're maxing out the 2 GB, then the extra GB will likely be better than running 2 GB dual channel, and relying on swap . . . – ernie – 2013-12-09T21:46:13.193
So generally speaking, it's not 'catastrophic' (50% performance hit) to run with the extra GB as a single? – Aaron – 2013-12-09T21:48:41.137
You're usually not using full memory bandwidth, so in most cases, you won't see a big performance drop. If you're swapping frequently, then the memory bandwidth becomes a non-issue, as disk speed will be the limiting factor. I'd focus on figuring out if you're swapping, and if so, more memory will win out over dual-channel. – ernie – 2013-12-09T21:53:07.913