Dual Channel Ram Vs Unpaired Ram (what Do They Mean, Anyway?)

i took possession of a preconfigured dell precision m90 laptop sometime last year. it came with 2gb of ram. as a result of 'chook eye' i decided to upgrade to 3gb of ram-  since the system can support 4gb of ram(actauly any sys running a intel 945 v chipset will only see 3.25gb of ram - but thats another story)

in typical murphy fashioon, it was after i bought 1 gb of ram at pc village, got home and opened my system that i found that the laptop only has 2 DIMM slots ( i'D assumed that it came with 4 DIMM slots)which means if i want to upgrade to 3gb i need to buy a 2gb ram stick .which brings me to my question-

it appears there something called dual channel mode, which implies that ram must be paired ie 512 to 512, 1gb to 1gb, 2gb to 2gb .

it appears there may be some issues in using 1gb of ram with 2gb of ram(unpaired mode) . i haven't found that much info on the net.

dakmanzero, r u there?

anyway, i'D appreciate if anyone could confirm if my system will not support unpaired ram, or if it will take a performamnce hit if i choose to use it. thanks

Well, your systems wouldshould still work just fine with the unpaired memory. Memory pairs are necessary when you want to operate the memory modules in dual channel mode. Benchmark tests have shown that there's almost no significant  improvement in running dual channel mode over single channel mode.

In your case, the 1GB + 2GB memory modules would result in 3GB in single channel mode. Within the bounds of my knowledge, there's should be no adverse effect in this pair.

You could read some more about these on this site: Memory Architecture

If the dude is reasonable, that should not be much of an issueatleast, since you'll be getting another memory module from him still.