12GB RAM Too Much?

[fluffmonster]

Different cpus/mobos have different numbers of memory channels, with the vast majority being dual channel and 1366/x58 being triple channel. The best performance occurs when you have identical sticks for each channel, though the margin of "best" here can be very thin. Much as it pains me to defend Nater, consumer boards which are probably what is relevant here do usually come with two dimm slots per channel, hence 4 or 6 dimm slots. Intel LGA 1156 or 775 systems and any AMD system less than 5 years old are all dual channel and so you would want either 2 or 4 ram sticks. If a stickis 2GB, then you want either 4 or 8 GB ram total. LGA 1366 systems have 3 memory channels and most x58 boards have 6 dimm slots, so best performance comes from 3 or 6 sticks (though they perform damn near as well with just 2 ram sticks), so for 2 GB sticks you're talking 6GB or 12GB total.

To answer the question though, 12GB of ram is greatly excessive. 6GB should be plenty, and you can always pick up more if really necessary. However, if you do not have an x58/1366 system, then you should not be buying either...get either 4GB pack or 8GB. Note that this has nothing to do with whether the ram is ddr2 or ddr3 in particular, though x58 boards require ddr3 and so you will only see 3-stick packs of ram in ddr3. 2-stick ram packs come in both ddr2 and ddr3 flavors.