How over 4 banks of RAM affects performance.

[Piccoro]

BTW 2 sticks of 512MB memory is 4 Banks.
2 sticks of 1gb RAM is also 4 banks.

This is a few months old article but I just gave this link to someone I know who was asking about it.
I thought that the people on this forum are about the most likely to use a lot of RAM in their systems so I thought I'd share.
LINK
This is the affect of having too much RAM and why Registered RAM is such a good thing, especially if you need a lot of Memory.

[ofbarea]

My PC is based on Intel 875 chipset. For this specific chipset a bank is composed of two DDR400 memory sticks of the same capacity.

When using Si Soft Sandra If I use two memory banks, memory bandwidth is reduced a bit.

I tested this with four 256MB CAS2 Memory sticks that I bought for me and friend of mine.

The memory access was always faster with just 512 MB (2 sticks, 1 memory bank).

[rallynavvie]

I run 4x sticks of 512MB ECC reg. RAM in my PC. I'm sure I see maybe a 2-5% hit on performance from when I had only 1GB (and wasn't running the ECC bit) but I certainly don't notice it. Odd thing is my board supposedly reserves some RAM for the PCI bus. Not exactly sure what that's about...