Additional RAM causing instability?

[Paradoxical95]

Hey Everyone,

Okay so I had 16 gigs of Thermaltake RAM (2 sticks of 8Gigs) in my PC. Installed in correct slots. Then today another 16 gigs arrived (exact same kit of Thermaltake, exact speeds/latency/capacity) making a total of 4 sticks, 8GB each, for a total of 32GB. Somehow now it's crashing everything I run. Games ? Crashing. Which one? You name it. Red Dead Redemption 2, Forza Horizon 5, F1 2020 and so on. Other software ? Crashing as well. Blender? Substance Painter? All of them. Plain crashing. But system (and apps) are stable when I just run 16 Gigs. What to do?

CPU - AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Mb - Gigabyte B450M DS3H, RAM - Thermaltake Toughram Z One 3200Mhz CL16.

Things I tried -
1) Same crashing at default 2666Mhz. And manually setting freq to 2800 or 3000 or any other value, stops the PC from booting.

2) I placed my old sticks on the left side and new ones on right side (i.e not following the convention of 1-3 and 2-4 but instead doing 1-2 and 3-4) and that seemed to bring some stability. Games don't crash now. But Blender, Substance Painter, still crash on startup. What must I do now....?

TL;DR - 16 gigs is stable but 32 Gigs is making all apps and games to crash. Help needed

(I posted the same on Reddit. link )

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

RAM kits are rated to run at the advertised speed with the default configuration only, in this case with 2 sticks. Adding an additional set of two will sometimes cause errors, but often times it will work just fine.

 

You need to determine whether you have a bad stick in the new set, or whether the errors are caused by using two kits together and all four DIMM slots. Because the errors still occur when running default, I'd say the most likely culprit is a bad stick. But it could also be a bad DIMM slot, a bad CPU mount, or a bad CPU.

 

So, the first thing I would do in your position is download memtest86 and create a bootable USB drive. Install only the new kit of RAM in the correct slots, 1 & 3, and allow memtest86 to run through all 4 passes, or until you see errors. If you get errors, then you probably have a bad stick of RAM.

 

You might also test your old kit for a sanity check.

[Paradoxical95]

The RAM sticks I have now, are the ones that the seller tested (bcz the ones I had before this were faulty so I got them replaced and now the replacement ones are said to be working fine). I ran Windows Memory Diagnostic with all 4 sticks and it gave me hardware error. Then I tried running the 2 new ones and no errors. Then I ran the 2 old ones again no errors. Then I updated the BIOS and installed chipset drivers of my motherboard and it finally ran at 2666mhz but then again apps and games still crash.

 

Now I'm running memtest86

[--SID--]

18 hours ago, Paradoxical95 said:

(exact same kit of Thermaltake, exact speeds/latency/capacity)

They're not exact the same. Because they're not sold as a kit of 4 they're not matched and proper operation is not quaranteed. Thing is that Ryzen is picky on RAM that is not matched. Better to send the new kit back to the seller, sell your current RAM and buy a 2x16GB kit.

[freeagent]

Did you clear the cmos? Internal sub timings are much tighter with 2 sticks, adding 2 more without clearing the cmos can cause problems.