Solved RAM 4 slots or 2?

[GregH]

Hey all,

What is generally considered better and why?

I'm considering a RAM upgrade to 16GB for my Asus Maximus Hero VI motherboard. It has 4 memory slots for dual channel. My local supplier only has the memory I want in 2x4GB modules. If I purchase 2 kits to make up the 16GB is this less preferable to rather waiting for a 2x8 kit to be ordered. Is there any disadvantage to using all 4 slots as opposed to 2? I will be over clocking using the standard XMP profile only.

Future upgrading is not a concern as I will not likely need to move beyond 16GB for the life of this build.

Thanks!

 

[HarriePateman]

In reality, it doesn't matter. Either one will net almost exactly the same performance.

However, if you want to get technical, if it's only dual channel, then you will get better performance using only 2 slots with 8GB in each. The more chips and slots that you use, the longer it takes to find the piece of data it needs. It's not going to be anything you actually can notice, but if you ran a benchmark you'd see a slightly better score with just 2 as 4 chips is slightly more taxing for the cpu.

4 slots used looks better than 2 though. If you care about aesthetics.