I am currently running two 1G sticks of Corsair Dominator DDR2. I am looking to upgrade to a little bit more. I would just buy two more sticks but someone said that for overclocking i might wanna stick to only two sticks cuz i might have heat issues with more. Any suggestions
Memory does make heat, so twice as many sticks is going to make twice as much heat, in the same space that half as many sticks would make their heat. Also, this spot is right next to the CPU, so it could theoreticaly make the CPU run a tiny bit warmer. Plus, 4 sticks requires more "thinking" on behalf of the chipset; thus the chipset makes a bit more heat...and if the chipset it overclocked, then this might be too much for the stock chipset coolers to handle. For what it is worth, my system starts to crash at the same overclock with just two sticks, or with four sticks...it does not seem to make a difference...and I don't have a "ram fan" or aftermarket chipset coolers. I do have a decent CPU cooler; but this is a good thing to have when overclocking anyway. Given the fact that DDR2 is on it's way out, I wouldn't blow a bunch of money on memory with the hopes of overclocking an extra 10-20mhz...I would just get a pair of 1GB sticks...it won't be long before you are looking at the sticks thinking, "I wish I had some way to use this stuff".