Most of todays platforms are dual channel, besides the triple channel requirement of the socket 1366. The latter was very annoying, as the kits costed an arm and a leg compared to dual channel kits. With Intels X79 we go one step further and land in the quad channel area. However how effective is it all ? Can we just go for dual channnel without too much performance loss ? Time to find out :

Setup is easy either with 4 dimms installed for the Quad channel test, 2 dimms removed for the dual channel test. Think you already figured that one out :)

Even though SuperPi 1m is a rather quick test we already spot that the dual channel is slightly less efficient.

SuperPi 32M is 4 secs faster on the Quad channel setup, nice to know, but how does it influence more, there's that word again, " real world scenarios"

AIDA 64 shows better Read and Copy results in the memory bandwith test. The Write ouput is similar between the two ram configurations.

Y-Cruncher, the multi threaded Pi benchmark, is very close, the quad channel is barely faster.

Cinebench R11 tells the same tale. Hardly any difference to spot...

PCMark 05 and 07 very close call too, not really much to see. Quad Channel yes is faster, but it isn't a world of difference in this test.

Even the encoding X264HD test gains close to nothing from the extra pair of dimms. POVRay renders a whopping second faster.

Don't be fooled by maybe the misleading graph, Quad channel rars ( is that a verb ?) faster, but it will not be a matter of extra minutes to wait and extract or compress ya files.

And finally for the benchers, it doesn't matter much at all if you opt to go for dual or Quad Channel action. Dual channel might be easier to push and resulting to be the favourite of benchers iso of 4 dimms.