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I once had a clerk at Staples tell me that they couldn't in good conscience sell my father-in-law the really, really good deal on a laptop "because it had 6GB o
by checkyoursudo 8y ago
I once had a clerk at Staples tell me that they couldn't in good conscience sell my father-in-law the really, really good deal on a laptop "because it had 6GB of RAM, which is really unstable, like you know how CPUs only come in powers of 2 in order to work right", which I suspect could be translated as "this awesome deal of a laptop is a scam advertising offer, and we don't have any in stock and can't write a rain check at this bogus price."
- concerned_user 8y agoWhat he meant is probably based on the fact that if you are using double channel memory access mode then cpu can read from other module while first one is busy and since he said it was 6 GB so probably (4GB + 2GB) which means when you fill memory to 4 GB mark it will not have free module to alternate and performance will degrade. But this is all in theory and highly speculative in practice you would probably see 10-15% ram speed degradation not a 50% as you would expect. So unless there were some other issues like mismatched ram frequency the statement that is has to be in the powers of 2 is not really a hard rule, to perform optimally you want it to be but it is not strictly necessary.
- loeber 8y agoI'm willing to bet any amount of money that that's not what he meant.
- wccrawford 8y agoThe clerks at those stores often have no idea what they're talking about and just repeat things they've heard. In this case, it's actually very possible that the clerk really thought that incredibly stupid statement about a product that the store was selling. On the other hand, I've found that sales attracts and retains incredibly unethical people, too, so that's still a possibility as well.