Running Two 16gb of RAM and Two 8gb of RAM

[Grand Wales]

The questions:

Would it be worth it to run two sticks of 16gb RAM with two sticks of 8gb RAM simultaneously?

 

The RAM is identical except for the size of it.

 

From my understanding the four sticks will run in quad channel up to 32gb, and the remaining 16gb of ram in the two 16gb sticks will run in dual channel or single channel...?

Should I just sell my two 8gb sticks for $60 to some neighbor, and buy two more sticks of 16gb later?

 

This would be on a Ryzen Threadripper 1950X with a eight RAM slot motherboard.

I'm a tech noob so forgive my ignorance.

[Slayer3032]

You generally want to run with every channel being equal in layout, so if you had double what you had it would be great to mix a 16gb dimm with an 8gb dimm in each channel. if it was a dual channel motherboard I'd say that's perfect as-is but since it's a quad channel motherboard and threadripper on top, I have no idea if it would even work correctly.

 

I'd sell it, especially with how cheap ram has got lately. Maybe consider selling the 2x16gb, 4x8gb is quite a bit for most systems and down the road you'll still have another 4 slots that you can fill with used or new DDR4.

 

If you need the extra memory more than anything, yeah jam in as much as you can, where you can as long as it works in your setup and you have it on hand.

[Grand Wales]

From my understanding, you're saying it would be better to run four 8gb RAM in quad; rather than, two 16gb RAM in dual? Only mix them together if I feel I need 48gb of memory?

 

That seems to make sense. The system could use more hardware simultaneously?

 

It seems it would be best to temporarily use the two sticks of 16gb RAM, sell the two sticks of 8gb RAM, and in two weeks buy two more sticks of 16gb.

[Slayer3032]

Yeah, pretty much.

 

You're most likely never going to notice the difference between dual vs quad channel but I know Ryzen benefits the most from good memory. Threadripper performance in games can vary wildly since it's more like a dual socket cpu in a single socket than like a more conventional Intel platform. I'd be concerned about it having issues mostly since each side of the cpu has two channels I think.

 

Check your manual on where it suggests you put the sticks to run it in dual channel and just pick up another two sticks, you could try benchmarking it all out just for the sake of proving if you should or not. With a more temperamental platform like Threadripper in games, I don't think it would be worthwhile since you might come across a game that really doesn't like it or something down the road then you'll want to try to track down matching or similar looking kits. Which really isn't that important performance wise as long as the memory is similar in specs.

 

Someone who knows more about Threadripper could most likely be more specific and give you more concrete advice, I haven't had any experience with anything AMD that's Ryzen or newer. So I can't say how it will handle various memory configurations.