Topic: Ram Question: Dual sticks or single?

[gpw11]

So, I went to turn on my PC today after work and it froze at the RAM check.  After that it wouldn't post.  I opened that bitch up and messed around with the sticks, coming to the conclusion that one of my Dual Channel 2GB sticks is faulty. It's not the Dimm slot and not having both in there; one is certainly not working and preventing the PC from posting.  No big deal, I can run my PC on a single 2 GB stick.  Thing is I also have a 2 GB Dual Channel kit sitting around (2 1GB sticks) of the same RAM.  Would I be better off running that instead of the one 2GB stick?  Does it really matter? 

It's kind of a bitch, but what I had was probably overkill anyways since I'm on XP.

[scottws]

Generally, most modern DDR2 and DDR3 motherboards operate with memory in "dual channel".  Usually you'll have 4 DIMM slots on the motherboard, and two will be one color with the other two another color.

Dual channel has something to do with the overall memory bandwidth.  By having two 1 GB sticks in dual channel, you have double the memory bandwith than you would with a single 2 GB stick.  Here is the Wikipedia article about it.

Go with the two 1 GB sticks.