You still don't get what I am saying lol...
The RAM is twice as fast. It still isn't being utilized to its potential, but it can handle things twice as fast if they are thrown at it all of a sudden.
It kinda depends on the memory clocks for gaming. If it is uber slow, like 800 MHz, there will be a difference. Not a huge one but there is one. If its more like 1600 MHz and has ok timings, it won't really matter. It still does if you try to open big files, transfer data, etc.
It makes load times faster in big games, I have noticed.
but we're not talking about theoretical transfer rates here, when suggesting things to people we should use real world expectations and applications, the "uber slow" memory (DDR2 6400) that you're talking about is more than fast enough for 90%+ of the users out there and is probably overkill for 90% of Intel users...
in the real world, theory and practical application don't always mesh, the actual real world difference between the speed of the two modes that can be applied to most people's systems...
single channel vs dual channel
Tom's Hardware Synthetic Benchmarks
Tom's Hardware Audio/Visual Benchmarks
these are performance figures that people can actually use if they need to make a decision whether to buy a stick of 2GB DDR2 or two 1GB sticks of the same DDR2, obviously price is the other important factor that they can use in making that decision, talking theory usually only confuses them more than they already are, especially because they can't see figures or benchmarks to compare their choices...
we could talk all day about theory, like "hey, PCIe 3.0 is right around the corner, wait until PCIe 3.0 motherboards come out, they'll have twice the bandwidth of PCIe 2.0", but for all practical purposes that wouldn't matter since there aren't any cards out right now that saturate the PCIe 2.0 bus and maybe only 1% of users ever will until PCIe 3.0 is released...
yes, dual channel mode is faster and the preferred mode for DDR or DDR2, is it twice as fast...? theoretically yes, when applied to real world systems and real world applications...? no, is it enough of a difference for someone on a budget who could spend half as much on one stick as they would for two sticks...? not really, especially for most users...
