Question Mix n' match?

[Animus Draconis]

I recently did my first build, and I am curious about mixing up the RAM a bit. I was buying and building amidst my divorce and the one thing I forgot to buy was RAM.

A buddy gave me 2 sticks of DDR4 4GB 2400 mhz to get things up and running.

So my setup was

Ryzen 7 CPU
EVGA 1060 GPU
MSI X350 Turbo Motherboard
8GB DDR4 RAM
1TB HD
1200 Watt Power Supply

It functioned - but was like running a 2008 laptop, nowhere near what it should be. Minimum boot time was averaging 2 minutes and 30 seconds. It would hang and freeze. Games as simple as Minecraft would throw back a memory failure error half the time.

So I shelved it for nearly a year and a half now, when I bought 16GB DDR4 3000 mhz the other day on a whim at best Buy.

Runs pretty well now, but idk what to do with these leftover 4GB sticks. Am I able to stick them in the other channels and bump up to 24 GB Ram? Would they all run at 2400 mhz or can I overclock them to run at 2800?

Some sites I've read say absolutely never mix RAM and others say it'll be a breeze and work fine.

Any help would be appreciated!!!

 

[COLGeek]

Mixing memory can produce undesirable results. In general, when mixing slower and faster memory, assuming they work otherwise, they will often have to run at the slower of the two speeds for stability's sake.

You'll see little difference running 24GB vice 16GB. Try it out, but don't be surprised if your best performance comes from using the matched 16GB set.

 

[Animus Draconis]

Thanks for your reply!

My primary concern is rendering - I am a photoshop enthusiast, and was beginning to learn light room and aftereffects, which all get pretty RAM intensive.

As far as gaming goes, I primarily play ARK, and I noticed that when I initially load in, everything is fine, but if I fly out of or teleport away from my starting area, trees and rocks won't load in, even some of the AI. I got eaten by an invisible Rex last night haha.

So basically I can try it and if there is no improvement, just take it out, wait and buy another matching set of 16??