Get one stick now, buy another later, or only buy kits?

[Mathias_8]

Hello,
I wonder whether to buy one stick of Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB, DDR4-2400, CL16 now and buy another later, or whether this is too risky compared to buying kits. Or is the uncertainty exaggerated?

 

[weberdarren97]

I would only buy a kit. That way, they're guaranteed to be compatible with each other.

Even two sticks of the same model manufactured in the same batch from the same company may be incompatible with each other, and may cause the memory controller to crash. I always recommend buying kits to negate this effect.

 

[Hlsgsz]

You can do that. The risk is that they wouldn't work in dual channel. And if you don't game on integrated graphics, it won't make much of a difference.
This is actually what i recommend to people on a very tight budget that must get a cheap MB that only has two RAM slots.

 

[Mathias_8]

Are there any documentation or test of this compatibility issue I can look for? I haven't followed hardware indepth for several years and have no idea when this came up (or if it was always the case). Could there maybe be different rules for different brands?

Not having any hopes of course. I'm currently waiting for the AMD RX 480 custom card prices (€) to see what I can afford. Otherwise I could order the rest of my system right now.

 

[weberdarren97]

It's about the same for each company. And Hlsgsz makes a good point, it is possible to get RAM manufactured with different tolerances to run in the same system as long as you don't put them on the same channel.

 

[oobymach]

I would recommend kits as they are designed to work together, it takes skill and patience to get 2 different sticks even if they have the same timings to work together, you have to manually adjust timings and such, with kits you can set the xmp timings in most cases and be good to go

 

[Tradesman1]

Always best to get a set, no guarantees mixing packages will play together, more in my fiction article items 2 and 6 here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ddr-dram-myths,4155.html