As for the performance results, the results are all given on the diagrams below. First come the results of synthetic benchmarks:

As we see from the results, there is some difference between the performance of the platforms with different configuration of the memory subsystem. A system with two memory modules outperforms the system with four memory modules. And this appears true for both: bandwidth and latency values.

Now let’s see how these factors can actually affect the performance in real applications.

The situation repeats here again. The system using only two memory modules runs somewhat faster, although the performance difference is still pretty small. We are not talking about 3-5% performance drop like the one we get in Athlon 64 based systems when 2T Command Rate gets automatically enabled once four double-sided memory modules are installed. In our case, the difference makes about 1% at most, which can actually be neglected in most cases.

In other words, you shouldn’t be afraid to occupy all the four memory slots of your Pentium 4 system. The performance, as well as the overclocking potential will not be aggravated. However, this is true only for high-quality mainboards based on contemporary Intel chipsets. In other situations the results can be completely different.