Gadgetory

we're always talking about dual channel memory configs and to be honest we kind of take it for granted nowadays it's because most conventional motherboards in 2018 are set up to support dual channel memory out-of-the-box all you needs a pair of ddr3 or four modules and to avoid pulling a verge and placing them in the wrong slots like this that's literally all it takes to enable dual channel support it's super simple but what if we stripped a solid gaming PC of this feature would the average gamer or content creator even notice the difference between dual and single channel memory configurations we're gonna find out in this video gaben wads vertical PCIe kits are back in stock meaning you'll have the opportunity to trick out your rig and swing that graphics card sideways free unique look that's sure to impress your fellow pc gamers the bracket itself is extremely durable and easy to assemble the included riser cable is sturdy and reliable and the included display cables are custom and solid ok I'm running out of adjectives no snag one while you can on cable mods online store via the link below the tests will conduct in this video are straight for it I've got my personal rig behind me it's the one I use for both gaming and content creation I'll keep two modules in here these are g.skill shredding xe-dom' supporting a frequency of 3 gigahertz which will run out for the duration of this video but the first set of tests will gather our baseline data by running everything in dual channel mode looks like this this is what you'd expect most people to currently run and then I'll slide one of the modules into an adjacent slot that breaks the dual channel memory config in the case of this motherboard slots a1 and b1 are optimal for dual channel so running our second set of tests with RAM and slots a1 and a2 gosh this is cringy should keep us on a single channel now after running through the data will circle back and discuss why we saw what we saw and go into more detail as to what dual channel configurations actually do for a system these here are the system specs the benchmarking rig I guess you could call it all games by the way are loaded from a 2 terabyte hard drive 7200 rpm it's a Toshiba Drive this format is indicative of what I imagine a majority of gamers out there currently have so starting with those games grand theft auto 5 give us approximately 137 FPS on average and the high preset in the dual channel config in a mere 110 in a single channel this is honestly not what I was expecting I had seen many articles testing this very game and concluding that the channeling was virtually irrelevant right single channel for a still channel doesn't really matter for this game that's definitely not the case at least from my own testing and I ran these tests multiple times to confirm I imagined the CP is being forced to keep up with faster draws from the graphics card at lower resolutions the GPU can render frames significantly faster shifting that bottleneck to our CPU I created a frame time graph for this game as well so you could see the trend over time for both runs at a few places to to performs similarly but the dual channel configure Ender's frames significantly faster for a solid chunk of this Ben mark up next ashes of the singularity pretty much just a benchmark game at this point proves to be even worse of a candidate for single-channel memory configurations framerate drops by as much as 40% we're seen across the board I ran this one a few times more than usual to make sure that my results were consistent I even tried a single stick of RAM just to make sure I had nothing to do with the way I was stacking the RAM and the motherboard and yes the frequencies were locked to 3 gigahertz before and after I imagine this has a lot to do with the dx12 API which we predicted long ago would leverage more of the CPU in an effort to maximize parallelism that word gets me every time a parallelism moron dx12 in this video right here now diving further into this theory I tested shadow of the Tomb Raider in DirectX 12 as well and was rather relieved to see that our framerate drop wasn't a substantial this time around 101 versus 71 that's still pretty substantial but not as bad as before with a mere 8 FPS split among our lowest point 1% of frames drawn assassin's creed Odyssey was a much better story and though the frame rates across the board were still significantly lower than the very high preset 66 vs. 56 is definitely noticeable on average and then 36 verse 31 down low not as bad but the percentage difference there between the frame rates is still very consistent lastly f1 20-17 pumped out a sweet 119 FPS this game always performs well especially with Nvidia graphics cards in the dual channel configuration dropping by a mere 13 fps in single channel similar margins were reserved for the lowest 1% and point 1 percent of frames drawn by the way as well so not as bad with f1 2017 but across the board we did see a dip in frame rates which again is contrary to a lot of the online sort of like website reviews of single versus dual channel memory configurations I'm not sure why a lot of them were getting nearly identical for take this one for example I mean this guy was getting almost identical frame rates before and after the switch to single channel memory and I even tried Grantha but a 5 just like he did but my marchant's were much wider than his in fact his almost looked negligible across the board so I can't speak to their results but I can tell you I am 100% behind these benchmarks I trust these I triple check them at least triple check them and yeah this is the state of Dover single-channel memory right now so yeah let's uh let's discuss the results the gaming benchmarks can be summarized into one big it depends most CPU intensive titles like ashes of the singularity will deviate quite a bit from a baseline tool channel config by the way this may vary slightly uncomfortable AMD platforms since both companies manage memory pipelines slightly different and it isn't as different as it used to be but it's still noticeable but gist of the story is that memory calls from the CPU are being bottleneck right by a single channel now in some games you won't notice much of a difference at all f1 2017 for example didn't seem to care really I mean at all if it's there's a there's a difference there but it's it's not as substantial differences before in fact you'd be hard-pressed to discern the two if I showed them side-by-side that in game experience so I imagine this will be the case for most gamers in most titles but again in today's most intensive titles are clearly discriminating between the two configurations which is why it's important to abide by motherboard manual recommendations I thought it was very cool that the gigabyte Z 390 designee and my test rig warned me upon first boot that the RAM modules weren't seated in their optimal slots this is what it looked like of course it wouldn't matter if you plan on running four dims at a time but in case you happened to miss this indicator the splash screen upon posting is a nice feature and that's sure to save you from headaches that I'm sure the verge ran into when they first did this although he says that he knew what he was doing so remember that system Rams purpose is to store temporary chunks of information the CPU sees fit the benefit here is ultra-low latency and assuming you have sufficient capacity ample storage for intensive tasks you could in theory use something as slow as a hard driver even a floppy disk to store all of this temporary information as much as you could but it would require constant rewriting since the stuffs intended to be volatile that's not good for those drives and perhaps most importantly calls from the CPU would take forever relatively speaking over something like this SATA interface now all dual channel configs do is double available bandwidth the CPU meaning any large calls for information from the RAM won't have to travel down in there or paths at which point latency increases and frame rates drop that's a bit of what we saw in this video you can really think of bandwidth like a highway the more bandwidth available the wider the highway meaning more cars can move freely at the same time the cars are packets of data this doesn't make sense now in the case of ashes of a singularity where physics calculations are hammering certain parts of the CPU several threads were under near 100 percent load especially in that resolution we would expect dual channel memory to benefit us to an extent sans instructions are typically copied to and pulled from RAM in an instant all the time this prevents errors and data losses during that execution again what really matters are the program's themselves and how they utilize resources at their disposal now I know that the video title says gaming and I feel like you got a good dose of that but I want to reveal a case in which a system can benefit from dual or quad channel memory even outside of the gaming sphere and that's content creation now the application in mind is Adobe Premiere I use it a lot in my testing I actually use it all the time for videos like these and I'm curious to see how a simple render affairs we've got 4k footage mixed up with 1080p footage on a 10 minute and a five-minute timeline and the resulting bars indicate how long in seconds the render took and dual versus single channel memory makes surprise-surprise an enormous difference here a three are so many difference in the case of a 10-minute video render and a two minute difference in the case of a five-minute render I mean these are we're talking around 40% difference here in terms of just waiting for this thing to render it would make absolutely no sense for any serious content creator to run in single channel and this is why in fact many workstations sport quad-channel memory configurations which again doubles the bandwidth of a dual channel the law of diminishing returns comes in pretty handy in that case though and is useful really for only those applications taking advantage of huge chunks of system ram right where tons of data again the picture tons of cars being pushed on a highway you want several more lanes if you can have them that's what quad channel does opens those lanes up so the CPU can send and receive more information to and from the RAM in a much quicker amount of time without those latency is involved so I hope this video at least satisfied your morbid curiosity and maybe you'll learn to think of - I know I did researching the stuff scripting the video most of us with two or more modules are running in at least dual Channel you're probably fine but many are still stuck with a single so at least now you know what you're missing and some of today's newer titles if you're sporting maybe an older board or a single module and especially in Premiere Pro the differences are pretty substantial so what do you think are you sporting a single channel config in your own rig have you swapped out parts and test it on your own let me know in the comments below also something else to note you'll find that single modules they give you by just a single 8 gig stick it's going to cost you a little bit more than buying 2 for dig sticks the reason why is because you could buy a single 8 gig stick and then pair that with like four other 8 gig sticks down the line and then you can get 32 gigs out of just four modules versus if you buy 4 4 gig modules you're stuck with only 16 if you have only 4 slots then that's it you've maxed it out so you got to sell your RAM and you got to buy modules that have higher capacities so that's why those are more expensive it's not because they're better don't confuse the two you buy two dims if you can if you can buy 2 8 gig sticks 16 is plenty for gamers it's even sufficient for majority of content creators out there I've rendered a lot with 16 gigs even scrubbing the timeline isn't too bad although having more is never really gonna hurt in that case so just a little bit of inside scoop there by the way this video here still relevant I know this is a couple of years old at least but you'll be surprised by the number of games you can get by with only 8 gigs of DDR 4 or DDR 3 depends on the platform so give it on a watch if you're interested like this video without it was cool dislike it field and put opposite I got to breathe oh I'm just speaking too fast and I didn't I didn't think about taking a breath there ok we're good click that red subscribe button if you haven't already folks I appreciate it Merry Christmas if I don't see you before Christmas Day and I don't think we're gonna do a live stream this week but I am doing quite a number of Giveaways in social media so follow me down below Instagram Twitter Facebook we still have a chance to win pretty dope graphics tour this is science studio thanks for learning with us