Mac pro question

[garnet01]

Hey
I've been using Mac Pro's for years, for some reason I was always told to only add memory to three of the four slots. Does anyone know why this ever arose and is it good practice?
I've always filled the slots but often wondered it I'm wasting my time.
Gareth

[kav]

The 2009-2010 mac pros used tri channel memory meaning that maximum bandwidth was available with slots populated in multiples of three. I think some of the other oems had 6 dimm single socket machines, but anyway, performance in actual use was never found to be significant. I tried to find some better published reference, but this is the best I can find at the moment. This was a common topic a couple years ago. It could matter more today if memory bandwidth was a primary bottleneck in your workflow. More often it's just a matter of enough contiguous available memory.