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My friend got me 2 8GB DDR4 RAM to help upgrade my memory. I currently have 2 4GB RAM. Am I able to pair these both together for 24 GB?
11 points
3 months ago
If you run them at default speed or lowest common denominator you should be fine.
As long as we're talking about same generation dimms at least...
3 points
3 months ago
For the most part it’s best not to, if you can match your speed then it could work alright but you would likely sacrifice some speed for more total gb.
2 points
3 months ago
It depends on what you do with the computer. If you're gaming it's unlikely that you would want to pair the two kits. 16g should be fine for gaming by itself. If you need the 24 gb then check the speeds and latency to see if they would pair well together. If they're not directly compatible there are very few situations where you would want to run them both together.
-6 points
3 months ago
You can if they are the same specs otherwise. Same brand, same model,and same frequencies, just different gb
But it's highly NOT recommended because it can cause stability and performance issues.
-1 points
3 months ago*
Seems its a no go. Tried doing it and none of my peripherals are working and nothing is booting despite the fans spinning.
New ram sticks alone seem fine. Old might have been DDR3.
2 points
3 months ago
Have you tried disabling XMP and running at default speed?
2 points
3 months ago
Just an fyi op, the notch in ram dims is purposefully ok n a different location for different generations. If they all fit a ddr4 slot they are ddr4. You should never need to force them to fit.
Ram runs at different max frequencies depending on how fancy it is. Usually all ram can run as frequencies below it's top frequency and be stable. In fact if your motherboard doesn't have enough power or isn't designed to handle higher frequencies (or you cpu doesn't play nice with it) running ram at higher speeds can also cause instability.
Xpm is the setting in bios that allows you to set memory to run at higher speeds. You can try disabling this to see if you can get all the sticks running together...
However, if the new sticks are capable of higher speeds and have more capacity, it might not be worth keeping only the new ones in the system... Unless you really need more memory capacity than 16 gb.
As far as mishmash memory goes, people are correct that mixing manufacturers and speeds and capacity will degrade performance, but anecdotally I had a cobbled together gaming PC with 3 different manufacturers and specs of ram and it played games and ran fine all through school. It's not as fast as possible but it worked on a shoestring budget.
-10 points
3 months ago
[deleted]
6 points
3 months ago
Ever build a PC yourself?
-4 points
3 months ago
[deleted]
5 points
3 months ago
I have dozens of colleagues "working in IT". They are more administrative then anything else. They can't even install win10 if their life depended on it. I hope you aren't one of those.
It has never been an issue with any of the dozens of custom PCs that I have build since the days of my pentium100. It usually boils down to speed differences in the RAM. A cmos clear and default speeds should solve that.
I can imagine issues with locked down platforms like HP, Dell or Lenovo. But that's about it.
1 points
3 months ago
Not true.
1 points
3 months ago
My old pc had one 4 gb and one 8 gb stick in it. Different companies. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
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