Mixing and matching?

callumrst · November 25, 2022

Hey there,

Long time watcher but new to the forum. I've purchased some new RAM for my system as I currently only have 16GB and I feel like I need more for what I do on my PC.

My current specs for info:

Intel Core i7 7700 Kaby Lake

ASUS TUF Z370-PLUS GAMING

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti

500GB SSD

2B HDD

Now, on to the RAM. I have two 8GB sticks of Corsair RAM. (https://www.corsair.com/uk/en/Categories/Products/Memory/VENGEANCE-LPX/p/CMK8GX4M1A2400C16)

I've just purchased 2 16GB sticks, again, Corsair RAM. (https://www.currys.co.uk/products/corsair-vengeance-pro-rgb-ddr4-3600-mhz-pc-ram-16-gb-x-2-10219023.html)

My question is, would I be better off adding the 16GB sticks to give me a total of 48GB of RAM, or replace the 8GB sticks altogether?

I've been having some crashing/bluescreen issues for a while now and my PC generally seems to have slowed down, a lot, so I'm hoping the increase in RAM will help.

Thanks

DreamCat04 · November 25, 2022

10 minutes ago, callumrst said:

My question is, would I be better off adding the 16GB sticks to give me a total of 48GB of RAM, or replace the 8GB sticks altogether?

You can keep the 8GB sticks. I have a Dell G5 that came with 2 8GB sticks, but because I wanted to do programming, I got myself a 32GB kit with the same frequency and timings and just installed it in the other 2 slots (that MoBo actually has 4 slots) so I now have 48GB of RAM. Just make sure that one 8GB stick and one 16GB stick are in one channel. But I guess that the two 8GB sticks are already running in dual-channel. Because if the 16GB were running in one channel and the 32GB in the other, you'd probably get single-channel performance as soon as the lower capacity channel is full.

I just saw that your 32GB kit is C18, so your 2 8GB sticks will most likely also be running at that timing

mariushm · November 25, 2022

I would suggest getting memtest on a usb stick to test your ram sticks.

Maybe one chip on one of the ram sticks has some issues and flips some bits once in a while, and you get bluscreen or crash only when some programs get corrupted due to reading data from that particular ram chip. If this is the case, with more ram, it's possible data will be read or written much less often from that ram chip on that ram stick, which means you'll get crashes even less often but data would still get corrupted in ram.