Dual Channel - Taking the video card out of the equation

My personal favorite for testing is SuperPi. It takes into account everything but the video card, unlike many of today’s benchmarks. It is a very simple program; it just calculates the desired number of digits of pi. I ran the one million decimal point test.

Four seconds is a long time when calculating the million digits. While most of the work is done by the CPU calculating the math, there is still some work by the memory. The math to be done has to be sent to the CPU and then sent back to the memory.

Afterwards I ran the four million digit test to see how much the extra bandwidth had to do with the times. Since the test is four times the size, I thought the difference would grow by about four times, if not more. I also expected to see a lot of swapping of memory to CPU and back to memory. However, the difference was six seconds, only two seconds more for three million more digits. I’m guessing that either Superpi didn’t really need the extra bandwidth head room; it used some of the bandwidth gained from dual channel, but a lot of the extra gained remained unused.

Conclusion

The boost in computer performance can be seen with dual channel memory. While the results aren’t breath taking, they do offer improvement for nothing. Running dual channel only means getting two memory modules instead of one, and setting them up correctly. If you want dual channel memory you can buy the dual channel pack or two of the individual modules. They will perform exactly the same. The price should be the same, or the two smaller modules may even be less.

Throwing twice as much RAM on the same amount of stick can cause a price increase. The only downside may be other factors relating to the memory, such as overclockability. You will only be able to run the memory at the speed or the worst stick. So if one of your modules can run 100 MHz faster then the other, it is stuck on the slower speed. If your computer supports dual channel, there is no reason why you should not be running it. Just remember that getting match pairs of memory, or even the dual kit, will save you a headache.