The ambiguity in most of the benchmark results we saw today sends a very clear message: on today’s systems, the advantages of Dual Channel memory setups are negligible for average users.
While some memory specific benchmarks, those designed to saturate bus bandwidth, demonstrated the Dual Channel system’s superiority, very few real-life applications took advantage of it, and some games even managed to perform better on the Single Channel setup.
Professionals who work with graphics and large documents could definitely use the boost in bandwidth, as they push wall-sized posters at print resolution around in Photoshop, or model entire cities in Maya, but most users will only notice small performance increases in a small number of applications.
Very much like with multiple processors, the advantages of a Dual Channel setup are restricted to specific commercial areas, and the performance return for average multimedia and gaming use does not justify the extra expense.
On the other hand, some of today’s cutting edge games are already pushing against the envelope pretty hard, straining the confines of hardware performance enough to justify the purchase of a Dual Channel memory setup to maintain optimum performance in the next six months to a year.
That fact, coupled with memory prices being at an all-time low in their notoriously ephemeral price cycles, leads us to formulate this cautious advice: get a Dual Channel setup now if you can, because by the time applications and games have caught up, and require both barrels of the RAM shotgun, you’re most likely not going to be able to afford it.
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