Well, this is far from being promising, I should say. The system with two additional modules installed demonstrated a significant performance drop in games and a few popular applications. In fact, this is not that surprising: most contemporary programs and applications feel quite comfortable with 1GB of system memory at their disposal. By adding two more DIMMs we increased the Command Rate timing and didn’t actually gain anything.

However, in order to make our performance investigation complete we had to test our Athlon 64 system with 2GB of system memory in WorldBench 5 test set, which shows the system performance in popular office and digital content creation applications.

The situation here is a little bit different from what we have seen before. According to the results obtained in WorldBench 5, there are a few applications that actually benefit from adding up more system memory even though the timing settings get worse. Thus, a system with four DIMMs and the total memory capacity of 2GB appeared faster than the same system with only two DIMMs and 1GB total memory in such applications as: ACDSee PowerPack 5.0, Adobe Premiere 6.5, 3ds max 5.1, Windows Media Encoder 9.0, MusicMatch Jukebox 7.10 and WinZip 8.1. All these programs work with large amounts of data and address the storage subsystem a lot. In other words, the performance improves due to deeper caching of the disk operations rather than due to the absence of operations swapping. Since the performance improvement wasn’t dramatic in all these applications, we would still insist that 1GB of RAM is more than enough for contemporary tasks.

So, it looks like the use of four double-sided memory modules in a system with Athlon 64 processors on E core revision will affect its performance quite negatively because of the peculiar organization of the processor memory controller. You should definitely keep this fact in mind when planning you next system upgrade.