Memory upgrade questions

[MSharpeWriter]

Last Year, I upgraded to a Ryzen 7 5800X with a Gigabyte x570 Aorus Elite Motherboard. Given that that I was tight on the budget at the time, I chose to skimp on the Memory, so I got 16GB kit (2x8Gb) of Corsair Vengeance LPX 3600MHz in Dual Channel mode. (I had budgeted for Ryzen 5, before the Ryzen 7 sale, and actually having more than I thought I had. Last PC had DDR3 memory.) Now is the time to upgrade, especially with two empty memory slots.

 

So a few things:

1. I believe that the Safest option is that I could add second 16GB kit from Corsair, with a similar/identical kit. Am I correct?
2. Could I drop a 32GB kit (2x16Gb) in addition to my 16GB (2x8GB) kit?

[GhostRoadieBL]

yes and yes

most reliable compatibility is to add a second kit of the same speed and CL of the kit already installed from the same model (Vengeance LPX) but it doesn't matter the capacity of the kit as long as you aren't mixing capacity on the same channel pairs

 

ABAB - A's being 8GB sticks, B's being 16GB sticks - totally fine and MHZ and CL being the same

AABB or ABBA - would not be able to utilize the full capacity of the 16GB sticks and have stability issues

[Chris Pratt]

Are you actually exceeding the 16GB? Adding more RAM than you need doesn't do anything for you, and it's certainly not the best idea to fill all four slots just because they're there. Running four sticks puts more stress on the IMC.

 

That said, yes, the best bet is to add a new kit identical to the original. You can add higher capacity. But performance can be variable once you're hitting the extra represented only on the one kit.

 

I'd personally recommend just buying a new kit of 32GB and flipping the original kit on the used market to recoup some cost. You'll have a lot less potential issues that way. That's assuming of course that you actually do need more capacity in the first place.

[MSharpeWriter]

25 minutes ago, Chris Pratt said:

Are you actually exceeding the 16GB? Adding more RAM than you need doesn't do anything for you, and it's certainly not the best idea to fill all four slots just because they're there. Running four sticks puts more stress on the IMC.

 

That said, yes, the best bet is to add a new kit identical to the original. You can add higher capacity. But performance can be variable once you're hitting the extra represented only on the one kit.

 

I'd personally recommend just buying a new kit of 32GB and flipping the original kit on the used market to recoup some cost. You'll have a lot less potential issues that way. That's assuming of course that you actually do need more capacity in the first place.

Am I actually Exceeding it? At the moment? I'm not sure.. but I'm hitting 14-15GB RAM usage under load.

 

I'm actually video editing and doing 3D rendering on it. So I have a feeling it's quite easily be enough to exceed the 16GB I have. I'm mostly doing 1080p content at the moment, but would the extra 16GB help when going bigger such as 4k? I could see 4k in the Future at for this rig.

 

Mind you I was previously driving a i5-4690k hard until last year..

[RONOTHAN##]

1 hour ago, MSharpeWriter said:

• I believe that the Safest option is that I could add second 16GB kit from Corsair, with a similar/identical kit. Am I correct?

Yes and no. Yes, that is usually the safest option. It, however, is not guaranteed to work. Corsair/G.Skill/Teamgroup/Kingston/whoever change out what memory chips they use from day to day to whatever is on hand that works in that speed bin, and some memory chips absolutely hate each other. You could get lucky and end up with the same memory chips, or you could get unlucky with memory chips that absolutely hate each other. The only exceptions to this are Crucial because they are owned by Micron and almost exclusively use Micron memory chips (there are a couple exceptions, but it's a pretty safe assumption to assume Crucial memory is running some Micron IC), or when memory is a solid bin for one specific memory chip (i.e. 3200MHz CL14 is always Samsung B Die), but Corsair has no solid bins, so you you're stuck gambling.

 

At least you are with new kits. Corsair, luckily, does label what memory chips are present in the memory sticks right on the sticker, so if you go in store to get a new kit or find a kit on eBay, you can see exactly what's in them. On the back there will be a 3 digit version number that corresponds to the different memory chips being made (v4.31 is Samsung B Die, v3.41 is 16Gb Micron Rev B, v5.33 is Hynix DJR, etc). Try to make sure the kit that you do end up buying has the same memory chips and it will be basically guaranteed to work. That's the same for all Corsair memory as well, so if you're fine with the mismatched look you could get a kit of Dominators as long as the version number is the same and it should work perfectly. 

1 hour ago, MSharpeWriter said:

Could I drop a 32GB kit (2x16Gb) in addition to my 16GB (2x8GB) kit?

Yeah, but don't expect speeds to be any good. Either you'll get a dual rank kit of the same memory chips you currently have and will therefore be running triple rank (which the Ryzen memory controller hates) or you'll be running two different memory chips which the memory controller won't like. If you want your speeds to be good, go for the same exact kit. If you don't care about speeds, sure, it'll probably boot at ~3200MHz.

[Chris Pratt]

21 minutes ago, MSharpeWriter said:

Am I actually Exceeding it? At the moment? I'm not sure.. but I'm hitting 14-15GB RAM usage under load.

 

I'm actually video editing and doing 3D rendering on it. So I have a feeling it's quite easily be enough to exceed the 16GB I have. I'm mostly doing 1080p content at the moment, but would the extra 16GB help when going bigger such as 4k? I could see 4k in the Future at for this rig.

 

Mind you I was previously driving a i5-4690k hard until last year..

Yes, in that case, you probably would benefit from more capacity. If this was just for gaming, you almost certainly wouldn't, so I had to ask. There's a surprising number of people that think they can get more FPS or something with more capacity, and it just doesn't work that way unless you're actively paging to the filesystem.