For your information, there is no single or dual channel RAM. Single or dual channel is a property of the memory controller.Quote:
Originally Posted by OMGmissinglink
You appear to be confusing single rate SDRAM and double rate DDR SDRAM. DDR (Double Data Rate) clocks transfers at twice the memory clock rate (data is transferred on both the rise and fall of the clock waveform, compared with only on the rise for SDRAM). So DDR 2700, which runs at a 166MHz clock rate, has effectively twice the bandwidth of single rate SDRAM on the same clock speed, and is referred to as 333MHz (not 266).
We're not talking about that, we're talking about single channel or dual channel architecture - the width of the data path between the memory and the memory controller. Because of the greater operating efficiency of having two channels independently addressing separate DIMMS, dual channel gives a real world throughput improvement of typically 10-15% as I've benchmarked it.
That would mean if smith's lappy motherboard was dual channel architecture, and this reverted to single channel due to unmatched DIMMS, there would be a loss in memory throughput, but it wouldn't be huge. But the info suggests the motherboard architecture is not dual channel, so in this case as it's already single channel, no performance change would occur due to dual channel reverting to single.