Ram compatibility questions

[monkeychicken]

Hey Y'all

 

Thanks in advance for any responses.

 

I currently have a gskill ripjaw, 3600 mhz, 2 x 8 gb kit in my asus tuf gaming x570-plus (wi-fi) board. I was recently gifted the corsair vengeance, 3200 mhz, 2 x 16gb kit. While I know it's not ideal, would you say that adding this additional 32 gb of ram and having my 3600 sticks clock down to 3200 is worth the additional ram? On the other hand, is overclocking my new 3200 sticks to 3600 mhz even possible? (I am not too familiar with overclocking in general)

 

With this in mind, if it is worth adding the new sticks, should I put these in the 1/3 slots (a1 b1) or does it not matter?

 

Thanks again

[Hairless Monkey]

You didn't tell us any specifics about what applications you use which would benefit from more than 16GB of RAM, or any specific occasions when running out of RAM was an issue for you. So I assume you do not use such applications, and you have not had issues with running out of RAM.

 

So you should probably just stick with what you have. Maybe sell the RAM you don't need, or re-gift it to someone who could use it.

[RONOTHAN##]

4 minutes ago, monkeychicken said:

is overclocking my new 3200 sticks to 3600 mhz even possible?

Maybe. This will depend on the specific RAM ICs found on all the sticks. Download a program called Thaiphoon Burner, that can read the SPD of the memory sticks found on the G.Skill kit to see what it is, then look at the Corsair kit for a version number (it'll look something like v4.31 or v3.34) and google "Corsair version vX.XX" and see what that refers to (Corsair uses the version number to code what RAM IC is found on each stick). If you have mismatched ICs, then I wouldn't recommend going above 3200MHz (I've done it before, it is a ton of work tuning and you rarely get that far, pulling hair out the entire time). If they are matched, then yes, you can likely run 3600MHz on everything, just punch in the timings, frequency, and voltage of the faster kit, run a memory stress test and you're good to go. 

 

If you don't need 32GB of RAM and can't overclock everything to 3600, I'd just keep the 3600MHz kit in your system. Memory performance will be basically the same between the two since dual rank (running dual rank vs. single rank is like adding 400MHz of bandwidth), but the infinity fabric will be clocked worse on the 3200MHz config so multi core performance will go down slightly. 

[monkeychicken]

Ok thank you both! Yea ill think and see if the additional ram would actually help me with the programs I run. Will also try thaiphoon burner and see what it shows me- will prob post my results here to just to make sure I interpreted it correctly.