Is there any real difference between 4gigs of RAM on 4 sticks vs 2 sticks?

The difference in performance is tiny enough to be imperceptible.

No, 2 is extra beneficial than a million. The "laptop professionals" (whoever they may be) say that the reason for 2 rather of a million is that that is balanced. something approximately that is extra beneficial to run RAM in pairs. i do no longer understand if that is in basic terms a sales gimmick or what. yet, Dell bought me my cpu with 2 256s rather of a million 512. with a bit of luck they understand what they're doing. desire it facilitates!!

Two sticks will make it easier to upgrade later on, there will still be two free spaces

Otherwise, so long as all the sticks are the same size (2 x 2GB or 4 x 1GB) I don't think there will be any difference

If your mother board has four slots and supports DUAL CHANNEL RAM then you should use Four sticks all exactly the same. Dual Channel RAM is faster than single channel RAM.

There's basically no difference at all, because whether you use two or four they will run in dual channel mode (if your motherboard supports it). There's no such thing as quadruple channel mode... yet.

As for the RAM, read this: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/260291-30-slot.

you want to get as few sticks as possible, yes it is true that it will perform better. if you think about it logcially, memory can access other memory alot faster if its on the same stick and not communicating via the front side bus.

2gb is a bit light from what I've read for a brand new ish game you need 4gb RAM

Is your processor handling it ?

example

http://www.amazon.co.uk/AMD-Phenom-Six-Core-Proces...