I have 1GB of RAM installed and when i installed them i did so as a matched pair without really know why. I have googled and cant find many useful links so my questions are: - What is the difference between a matched-pair and non-matched-pair setup. - Is there a performance loss/gain from using match-pair ram? Thanks, Dave

It depends on whether or not your mainboard is designed to take advantage of a matched pair, ie it supports a dual channel architecture. Its hard to tell without the specifics of your hardware.

You may find this article helpful.

Yes it is configured for that, i bought the mobo, ram and cpu as a bundle, so it probably is optimium performance without overclocking.

In general, pretty much every motherboard nowadays supports dual channel stuff, so you should try for that as often as possible.

On a lot of older machines, memory interleaving was supported (it was mandatory on the Mac II series, for example) and provided a performance boost, but nothing on the order of dual channel. It's a pretty significant boost.