Ram, CPU, Motherboard compatibilty, 2 x Dual channel ?

[Ashley_Daywalker]

Please excuse my lack of knowledge as this is my first time picking and assembling my own pc components and i would like to make sure i get it right.

Ideally i would like to run a 6700k skylake in a MSI Z-170A Krait edition mother board with 2 lots of 2 stick kits, so 2 x GeIL 16GB Kit (2x8GB) DDR4 2400MHz kits for a total of 32gb.

Will this work??

Both the motherboard and cpu only seem to like dual channel kits, so will i see any performance loss trying to run that much ram in that configuration. I've seen mixed opinions on different forums and would really appreciate a final definitive answer.

I am aware that i will never need that much ram but i do not like to see the empty slots and for the extra $100 i would just like to put 2 more stick in there as long as it doesn't cause issues.

 

[DonkeyOatie]

The CPU will run on the motherboard.
The memory sticks will run on the motherboard, all four of them, in dual channel mode.

Last summer, I did a test of memory configurations (admittedly DDR3) starting with 1 x 4 and going up to 2 x 4 + 2 x 8. I discovered that 2 x 8 was slightly slower than 2 x 4 in my synthetic benchmarks. (2 x 4 was at least slightly faster than any other configuration)

Here's a summary of some of the data I collected.

From this, I would expect your system to be slightly slower with the second set of RAM installed. In many circumstances, the performance loss will be so small, you are unlikely to notice it.