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OK, here is the deal. I recently traded 2 sticks of 512 ddr 400 "cheapo" ram for 1 stick or corsair 512 ddr 400 "expensive and apparently bad-ass" ram. I recently ran the benchmark and the comparisons on the chart were not that much different. Now my question is....Does the benchmark only test the quality of 1 stick at a time? Or does it test both sticks simultaniously working together? I want to know if i got screwed in this trade or is this stick that i have now just as good as both of the sticks i had before. thanks in advance!
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Well obviously you only have half the RAM you previously had. So from that point of view it was a bad deal.
Both the cheapo RAM and the Corsair RAM claim to be DDR 400. So broadly speaking they should be the roughly same speed.
The claimed better quality of the Corsair RAM may mean that it lasts longer and is less like to beak down.
There may also be some marginal difference in the CAS Latency values. But unless you are over clocking your PC, you probably would not notice the difference. There is a summary of what the CAS values mean here,
http://www.sysopt.com/articles/latency/
The advanced memory benchmark will certainly use both sticks of RAM. The amount of RAM tested is proportional to how much you have installed.
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David -
so in other words, since the bars on the benchmark are the same length, and you said that they are using both sticks when i had the gig of cheap ram, then the 1 stick of corsair is twice as good as the 2 sticks of cheap ram? i may have misunderstood.....forgive my newbiness.
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Yes, I think you have mis-understood.
The quantity of RAM that you have does not determine the speed of the RAM. You can have small sticks of fast RAM, and large amounts of slow RAM.
PerformanceTest measures speed and not quantity.
So if the bechmark figures are the same for the two different types of RAM, then the RAM is roughly the same speed (at least when used in your motherboard).
So your speed is about the same as before you did the trade, but now you have half the qty.
Having said that, the qty of RAM that you have installed can indirectly affect the speed of your PC, but only if you run out of RAM becuase you are running too many applications at the same time. If you didn't run out of RAM when you have 512MB of RAM, then adding an additional 512MB will not increase the speed of your PC.
I hope that makes sense.
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