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

BillEssley

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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

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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.
 

BillEssley

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BillEssley
My motherboard can run 8GB RAM or bigger than that amount, I only need to run Windows 64 bits to support fully. However, I want to know if I run dual RAM then it will be better or not if I run a single RAM with same amount of RAM.
 

VirtuBox

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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

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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 :)
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

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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.
 
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