Little to none benefit with dual or tripple channel memory?

[MistaPi]

http://www.guruht.com/2010/03/core-i7-single-vs-dual-vs-triple.html

Doesn't seem to matter that much, or is there a big difference in spesific applications?

[Davros]

pcmark vantage isnt enough to draw a conclusion from

[MistaPi]

Fair enough. But is there any real world application benchmarks that show a big gain with dual-channel memory, with say Corei5/i7 or Phenom ii? I've tried google it without much luck.

[Silent_Buddha]

No, there's virtually no difference in most consumer applications and in most games. There's some sites that have tested Lynnfield (double channel) versus Bloomfield (triple channel) and clock for clock the difference is negligible in almost all cases. Granted there's a few architectural changes between the chips also, but those shouldn't result in any large performance disparities.

Regards,
SB

[Davros]

the main advantage of getting a triple channel board is they have more ddr slots (if you need a lot of ram of course)

[neliz]

This is a TH article from 2008: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-Core-i7-Nehalem,2057-13.html

I think Overclockers only run with single DIMMs?!

[fellix]

Bloomfield got its triple channel interface because it was meant primary as a server MPU -- not much for desktop, really. The wider DDR3 interface was put to balance out the ultra-aggressive hardware prefetch mechanism in Nehalem's architecture, in combination with its fast and big L3 cache. Running out eight threads in parallel can generate many outstanding I/O requests in a typical server environment, where most of the tasks are I/O bound, anyway. Some admins had to turn off the HW prefetcher in Core 2 based Xeon systems, because it was way too aggressive (not to match Nehalem, though) for its tiny FSB interface, or see reduced overall performance.
And yes, the other reason is that with three channels it can simply handle more DIMMs at higher clock-rate. ;)

[metafor]

On top of that, Quickpath allows one processor to directly fill its cache with the memory pool of another. So each memory controller not only has to provide data for its local processor but potentially data for others.

[BRiT]

This is a TH article from 2008: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-Core-i7-Nehalem,2057-13.html

I think Overclockers only run with single DIMMs?!

Overclockers who are doing 'suicide runs' only use single DIMMS. They're going for highest overclock, not best performance. This maximizes their stability because it minimizes power draw and stress load on the CPU and Motherboards.