Which RAM to Router :D

tankersss · May 23, 2015, 5:23pm

I'm assembling an router with pfsense, and I have to chose betwen 2x512MB DDR2 400 and single 1GB DDR2 533/667/800(need to chose :c), which one should I get? Also will an ATA drive be good or shall I get SATA one?

CPU Intel Pentium D 336 2.8GHz
MOBO Gigabyte GA-945GCM-S2L

R00tz31820 · May 23, 2015, 5:27pm

How extensible do you wish this firewall to be... I personally run one and it has 8 gb ram BUT... it is really powerful.. if you are setting this up for avg home use.. 4gb should be more than adequate

tankersss · May 23, 2015, 5:37pm

This will be just for about 2-3 weeks till I get right parts, and I got only 1GB avalaibe now D: Also It's mostly for monitoring which user is getting most packages couse ISP router sucks and It have very little options xd

Dexter_Kane · May 24, 2015, 12:15am

It's probably not going to make much of a difference but I'd go with the faster RAM. 1GB should be enough for most things unless you want to run snort with a ton of rules. Hard drive speed really doesn't matter much, you can run pfsense of a usb drive.

anon37239676 · May 24, 2015, 1:48am

I don't have time to re-educate myself about this atm, but people might say that it won't make a difference which you go with (because it won't, in gaming). It might do when used in a router, though. It does in some applications. Here's a source that should hold some interesting information for you that could help you decide which to go with.

There's the corresponding article linked here in a quote from a handy user who made it a bit more concise:

How bad am I for using 1 dim of RAM?

Since you have 8GBs right now, lets talk about it in 8GB totals. Theoretically, you will only see a performance improvement by going to a setup with 2 4GB DIMMs. When properly installed (as per your motherboard manual) this will put you into dual channel operation. Going beyond this, using 4 2GB DIMMs will not improve performance any further because your RAM slots on the motherboard are grouped into banks that operate on each channel with two slots per channel.

If you were operating on the modern Intel X platforms, you would be provided quad channel operation, so using 4 2GB DIMMs would give you a further theoretical performance improvement. Since most of those motherboards have 8 RAM slots, we can take this a step further and think about 8 1GB DIMMs. This would still only leave you in quad channel operation and would no performance increase would be realized.

This article (http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/1349-ram-how-dual-channel-works-vs-single-channel) does a really good job of explaining it. Based on the testing they did, you won't see much increase in gaming performance by switching to a dual channel setup. If you any kind of productivity or computational workload, you will see some improvement, but it probably won't be earth shattering.

Hope this helped!

Grayson · June 28, 2015, 11:10pm

I didn't see this until now. Thanks for the credit @SpaceCat!