As the Hardware Times motto goes, “it just works.” Well, at least when it does work. This can be confusing because there’s usually no “on switch” for dual-channel memory. Or, you could just get 4 RAM modules and have it run by default. Your motherboard manual will tell you which slots to insert your RAM modules if you want to enable dual-channel. If you have 4 slots, however, things are a bit more complicated. If you have two slots and your motherboard supports dual-channel, setting it up is often as easy as inserting a second memory module and booting up. I had a Gigabyte B450 DS3H with 4 memory slots and dual-channel support.
Most budget to midrange boards will either have two or four memory slots. We have to stress an important point here: you need RAM modules in multiples of two in order to utilize dual-channel.
The only way to hit that level of performance in single-channel mode is to use memory modules running at 4000 MHz or higher. If you have a pair of 2133 MHz DDR4 modules in dual-channel, your memory bandwidth doubles to 34 GB/s. Single-channel 2133 MHz DDR4 delivers 17 GB/s of memory bandwidth. For most people, multi-channel means dual-channel memory. But what about multi-channel configurations? Technically, quad-channel systems exist, but they’re mainly found on server-centric and exotic boards. In dual-channel memory configurations, the memory controller uses both channels to communicate with the CPU, essentially doubling the bandwidth. This limits memory throughput to the rated speed of the slowest single RAM module installed. In a single-channel configuration, only one of them is functional. Most modern motherboards have two 64-bit (total 128-bit) channels between the CPU and memory. RAM communicates with the CPU through the memory controller on the CPU.
What is a dual-channel memory config, and what’s the difference between dual and single-channel configurations? And it has a far larger impact on memory bandwidth than overclocking your RAM modules.
But there’s a third concern that is often overlooked.
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