Most home PCs don't need registered / buffered memory. My main home PC has 2 DIMMs with 9 memory chips on each DIMM and it work fine. I have seen PCs at work with 4 DIMMs with 36 memory chips on each DIMM. It is unlikely that the memory bus would drive all these chips if they were not buffered.

Paul wrote:
>
> Registered memory, adds a register chip between the memory chips on the
> DIMM, and the control/address bus. The purpose of doing that, is to reduce
> the electrical load on the control/address bus.
>
> By doing that, you can put more DIMMs on the same bus. That is handy for
> building server boards, as they tend to have more DIMM slots than desktop
> boards.

--
Mike Walsh