Are single sided dimms better than double sided?

[CarpetMan]

I was told that this is the case. That single sided dimms used higher quality chips. Would this also mean that single sided dimms should overclock better?

 

[AndyHui]

A single sided DIMM is not necessarily better, nor does it involve higher quality chips. What is does involve is RAM chips of higher density than those of double sided DIMMs, ie you can squeeze the same amount of RAM onto one side of the DIMM instead of having to use two sides.

I prefer single sided SDRAM because there are certain chipsets out there that have a limited number of RAS lines (rows of RAM/sides of RAM). Some chipsets like the i815E only have 6 RAS lines, meaning they can support a maximum of 3 double sided DIMMs. However, some motherboard manufacturers implement 4 DIMM slots. Having single sided DIMMs means that you can use all 4 DIMM slots, whereas double sided DIMMs means that you cannot.

 

[boran]

on the other hand some mobos have trouble with the high density single sided dimm's

and if yer mobo has only 2 (DDR) dimm slots but supports 4 rows of memory then you'd like to fill up all rows to fill in the 4 lines ...

 

[AndyHui]

It's generally Intel chipset based motherboards that may have troubles with higher density SDRAM. For example, later steppings of the BX chipset will support up to 128MB on each side of the DIMM (ie max 256MB on a double sided DIMM). However, older steppings of this chipset won't handle it.

 

[CarpetMan]

Thanks for the helpful info. From what you say I gather that with my IWILL kk-266 m/b it makes no difference which I use.
As a second question,is their any problems associated with mixing single sided and double sided memory on the same board?

 

[AndyHui]

There is usually no problem associated with mixing single and double sided DIMMs.

 

[boran]

remember tho that brandmixing can cause unwanted effects ... mixing dimms from different brands is never good (mostly it will work but it is still not very safe to do it ..)