Which would be better to use, two 4GB RAM or one 8GB RAM?

BillEssley · Sep 26, 2018

I want to upgrade 4GB RAM to 8GB RAM for my PC but I don't know I should buy two 4GB RAM or one 8GB RAM? Which will work better? Why?

Aeolos · Sep 26, 2018

If you have 2 RAM slots then a one 8 gb of RAM is enough if you would like to upgrade in the future. However, if your motherboard can't take larger than 8 gb then you would want the two 4 GB of RAM. The advantage of using two RAM is when one RAM will fail along the way, you can still use your PC just using the other RAM. However, RAMs nowadays rarely die along the way and using one 8 GB of RAM would be good choice.

VirtuBox · Sep 26, 2018

BillEssley said:
I want to upgrade 4GB RAM to 8GB RAM for my PC but I don't know I should buy two 4GB RAM or one 8GB RAM? Which will work better? Why?

With 2 RAM modules, you can use the Dual Channel Mode. In this case, instead of using a single memory module of 64 bits, your computer will see your two RAM channels as a single one of 128 bits. In theory, it should double the bandwidth available, but in most of case, performance improvement isn't higher than 20%. So do not choose 2x 4GB instead of 8GB just to support dual channel.
You may want to add more RAM later, will you have enough memory slots available to go for 16GB for example (some motherboards provide only 2 memory slots) ?

BillEssley · Oct 8, 2018

VirtuBox said:
With 2 RAM modules, you can use the Dual Channel Mode. In this case, instead of using a single memory module of 64 bits, your computer will see your two RAM channels as a single one of 128 bits. In theory, it should double the bandwidth available, but in most of case, performance improvement isn't higher than 20%.

The final choice will be a RAM slot with 8 GB of ram for better advantage

VirtuBox said:
You may want to add more RAM later, will you have enough memory slots available to go for 16GB for example (some motherboards provide only 2 memory slots) ?

You are right on this, in the case i want to increase RAM to 16Gb then it is still possible to do that if I choose one 8GB RAM

Daniel204 · Oct 8, 2018

The 8 GB of RAM offers the feasibility for upgrades.

However, 4GB of RAM has the possibility of dual channel memory, which doubles your memory bandwidth. Especially for mixed GPUs, which are memory bandwidth limited, that is a big benefit.

RAM does not die nearly as often as it used to these days, so I do not consider the repetition to be a big help of 2 DIMMs.

Which would be better to use, two 4GB RAM or one 8GB RAM?

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