I am looking to purchase a Dell computer for trading, did not get in on that great deal of few months ago for the 4550 Diminsion for $399.... but noticed most of Dell's systems are now dual channel. Is dual channel a good thing or bad thing and does anyone know why they are going to this?? I spoke to Dell rep but he did not know.
in short, dual channel is almost totally good. dual channel means that the motherboard has a second, dual path to the memory, or ram. this increase in memory bandwidth is advantageous for most every application, in particular when used with a faster processor and when lots of ram is needed. the only down side is ram must be upgraded in pairs. for example, if you have two 256 mb sticks of ram, and you want to go to a gig of ram, you'll have to replace both of those with 512s. (note: if your board has 4 slots, then you could just drop in two other 256s.) complex