How Much RAM is Enough?

RAMs are dirt cheap nowadays, but how much is enough? I already got 2GB of DDR2-677 running on ‘dual channel’ mode on my PC, should I go for 4GB just for the sake of it? As I could not resist the low price attack I decided to go for it. Then another question arises: Would all RAMs in pairs support the so-called ‘dual channel’ mode? Could you mix the existing double sided RAMs with the newly single sided RAMs?

The answers are depending on your motherboards. Some motherboards would only support 4 single-bank (single sided chips) RAMs, if you already got 2 slots filled with 2 double sided RAMs then the remaining 2 empty slots might not be functional anymore. In this case you could only use 4 sticks of single sided RAMs if you intended to use up all the 4 slots. Now the next question is could you mix the single sided RAMs and double sided RAMs? Yes, you could but it would be on ‘single channel’ mode only, you won’t get the ‘double channel’ support.

I was quite lucky as my motherboard does support 4 sticks of double sided RAMs and it still could provide dual channel support, what I had to do was ensure that the 2 new RAMs I was going to buy were of the same brand, same capacity and double sided, that's it!

Lastly, how much RAMs would appear as the physical memory on your Windows? For 32 bits Windows, you might get roughly 3.25GB in total, including the shared memory for graphics. That means you might have 3.00GB reported by the System Information under the Windows environment. Yes, you lose roughly 800MB, but the improvement is quite significant and I personally feel that it is worth it.