Two DDR4 kits

Lucid_Zayne · November 10, 2022

Hello,

i have two ram kits:

1. Corsair vengeance LPX 16gb (2x8GB)

2. Corsair vengeance RGB PRO 16gb (2x8GB).

I was wondering if its safe to run both at the same time, in terms of longevity and performance. Ive tried to watch a couple videos and read some articles but haven't really found anything.

Cheers!

RONOTHAN## · November 10, 2022

Yeah, it's safe, though depending on what's in the kits there could be some incompatibility between them.

On the back of both of those kits there should be a version number that tells what memory IC they have. If it's the same version number, both kits should work together no problem (unless it's ver. 4.32, those can sometimes have compatibility issues with themselves). If they're different, I'd run a memory stability test to make sure they're stable (something like Memtest86 should do the job).

Longevity and performance for doing this are fine, in fact you might get slightly better performance because it's dual rank effectively rather than single rank. Doing this, even if they aren't compatible with each other and fail the stability test (or refuse to boot like what's more common if the chips don't like each other) won't harm them, it just means that they didn't like running together.

Lucid_Zayne · November 11, 2022

8 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Yeah, it's safe, though depending on what's in the kits there could be some incompatibility between them.

On the back of both of those kits there should be a version number that tells what memory IC they have. If it's the same version number, both kits should work together no problem (unless it's ver. 4.32, those can sometimes have compatibility issues with themselves). If they're different, I'd run a memory stability test to make sure they're stable (something like Memtest86 should do the job).

Longevity and performance for doing this are fine, in fact you might get slightly better performance because it's dual rank effectively rather than single rank. Doing this, even if they aren't compatible with each other and fail the stability test (or refuse to boot like what's more common if the chips don't like each other) won't harm them, it just means that they didn't like running together.

So i checked, the LPX kit is version 4.31 and the RBG Pro kit is version 4.32. I'm guessing i should do the stability test, i havent really ran into any problems with them running together but just wanted to make sure i was doing the right thing after i saw one of Linus' videos about mixing ram. Thanks again!

RONOTHAN## · November 11, 2022

Just now, Lucid_Zayne said:

So i checked, the LPX kit is version 4.31 and the RBG Pro kit is version 4.32. I'm guessing i should do the stability test, i havent really ran into any problems with them running together but just wanted to make sure i was doing the right thing after i saw one of Linus' videos about mixing ram. Thanks again!

So 4.31 is the weird version number, because there are actually a lot of 4.32 kits that are mislabeled as v4.31. You still want to do a stability test since v4.32 can have incompatibility issues with itself on occasion, and you might have actually gotten v4.31 which doesn't always play super nice with 4.32 IIRC (though v4.31 based kits are Samsung B die, which is hilariously inconsistent, so even if that's true that doesn't mean all v4.31 based kits won't work with v4.32), but if you're at a lower speed and it is able to boot the odds in general of an issue are very low..

I do have my problems with that video about mixing RAM, he only tested a couple kits with each other and said "yeah, you don't really need to worry about it" when I know for a fact it does not always work (have two sticks of DDR4 that will not POST if they're in the same system, though will always POST individually). Yeah it's usually fine, especially if you're at low speeds like <3200MT/s, but it's not always as painless as the video made it out to be.