Ram Configurations?

[sulylunat]

Ok so I have just acquired a new pc as a gift and im planning on making it my gaming pc. However, my RAM situation is  quite confusing and I need some advice.

My builds are as follows

 

Current Gaming PC

- i5 6600k

- 24GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 2400 MHz (3 x 8GB)

- RX470 GPU

 

New PC

- i7 8700k

- 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 2400MHz (1 x 16GB)

- No Dedicated GPU

 

So basically at the moment I use my PC for two things; Gaming and running my plex server. I currently have to leave my PC running 24/7 in order to run my media server and have it accessible all the time, but id rather not be doing that as its quite power hungry. Im planning on making the new rig my gaming PC as the processor is better and using my current rig as a plex media server/general household computer. I'll probably just swap over the current GPU for now in to the new pc. I know its a major bottleneck for the rig, but im waiting to see how the RTX2070 benchmarks against a 1080ti before I upgrade. After that I'll probably just put the RX270 back in the media server. Both motherboards are full ATX size so they have 4 RAM slots each, but I was planning on getting a new Mini ITX board for the media center as I want something thats going to be small and discreet. This of course means im only going to have 2 ram slots in that build but I currently have 3 sticks. I want to have a decent amount of ram in the computer as I am going to be using it as a media server so it needs enough resourses to transcode.

 

Do I:

A) Put the 16GB stick in the media server and put the 3 8GB sticks in the new PC

B) Put 2 x 8GB sticks in the media server and 1 16GB and 1 8GB in the new PC

 

Performance wise, would I have any major performance issues running 1 16GB stick and 1 8GB stick, or would I be better off running 3 8 GB sticks?

[Srnewbee]

A is a better option but use 2 ram sticks in the new pc to take adv of dual channel.

[sulylunat]

50 minutes ago, Srnewbee said:

A is a better option but use 2 ram sticks in the new pc to take adv of dual channel.

Will I be better off only using 2 of the 8 GB sticks or shall I use all 3? Will I affect performance negatively by having the third in there? Its actually how ive been running my current PC for two years so I hope not...

[Srnewbee]

well if the programs that you used required less than 16gb, then your performance suffered a bit. ~15%. If it required more than 16gb, then 24 GB helped.

21 hours ago, sulylunat said:

Will I be better off only using 2 of the 8 GB sticks or shall I use all 3? Will I affect performance negatively by having the third in there? Its actually how ive been running my current PC for two years so I hope not...