I'm trying to understand the PHYSICAL difference on the motherboard when it comes to single, dual, triple and quad channel memory.
I have a mobo that has 4 black memory slots, each one contains 4GB of RAM, a total of 16GB.
Since I have a 1155 socket I know I am limited to dual channel only.
But what about a 2011 socket? It supports quad channel memory but I do not understand how that would look on the motherboard, physically. I've seen many dual channel slots and there are only 2 colors.
Would triple or quad channels have only 2 color variants also or would there be more colors?
Best Answer
Not more colours, but a larger set of sockets in the same colour. E.g. a X58 based board (triple channel) would typically give you 6 sockets. 3 coloured blue and 3 coloured white.
(aka triple channel).
Since a typical consumer setup has a memory controller which can handle up to 2 dimm sockets* this translates to 3x2 memory banks. You want to use all memory controllers at the same time, so you put one DIMM on each memory controller. This set has the same colour.
The typical setup can handle two DIMMS per memory controller. So you get a second set of colours.
In a consumer quad channel setup you would expect two sets of four. So two colours and 8 DIMM sockets.
In a server setup you will find more sockets per memory channel. E.g. my home server (A Dell R300) has 6 DIMM sockets. It is dual channel. So I got 3 sets of 3. Which is logically quite different from the two sets of three in my home desktop.
Based on this you can easily extrapolate for other configurations.
*Or rather up to 4 ranks. One regular consumer DIMM counts for 2 ranks, so that translates to 2 DIMMs. In server based boards this is often different, but that comes at the cost of speed.