12GB RAM Too Much?

[ua549]

And what do you mean 'specs say double or triple channel'? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, you either have 3/6 DIMMs (tri-channel) or you have 2/4 (dual channel).

The specs make the difference, not the number of memory slots because there are boards with more than 6 slots. My desktop board has 8 memory slots and my server board has 18 memory slots. I've owned boards with 2, 4, 12 and 16 memory slots.

IMO one should not make a generalization based on the number of memory slots since there are boards with 1, 2, 3 and 4 memory channels.

[Nater]

The specs make the difference, not the number of memory slots because there are boards with more than 6 slots. My desktop board has 8 memory slots and my server board has 18 memory slots. I've owned boards with 2, 4, 12 and 16 memory slots.

IMO one should not make a generalization based on the number of memory slots since there are boards with 1, 2, 3 and 4 memory channels.

There are not any boards that any of us would be buying with four memory channels. FB-DIMM could do a pseudo four channel, but not really. The northbound and southbound bus widths were asymmetrical. We're not talking about 2S/4S boards here, that's not what the guy is looking at. Not that FB-DIMM really matters for any new system anymore, the technology is dead. intel has decided it better to go back to standard registered DIMMs on two socket servers and motherboard bound memory buffers for Beckton.

'xxx channel' isn't a memory spec either, it's a northbridge and/or CPU specification. Not to mention I wasn't referring to the number of DIMM slots, but the number of DIMMs in a kit. A triple channel kit is going to have three or six DIMMs, a dual channel kit will have two or four.

Using the memory slot number to determine dual/triple channel would also apply with nearly every consumer motherboard manufactured over the past five years excluding early build low-end X58 motherboards and Gigabyte's P55 UD6 with six memory slots.