ravenhaven03 :
So if getting the same 8gb single stick at a later date might not even work, would getting the same 2x4gb kit at a later date work or would it be the same situation where it could, but not necessarily as is with a single stick?
Also, can i get some specific recommendations for the kits? Brand and specs?
It will work, but it might not work at its full potential.
Check out this old comment for some good information on this -
"Motherboard makers need to care about the RAM used in their boards. They are required to warranty their own boards. If you put bad RAM in the board and blew up the motherboard, you might ask them to replace the motherboard which costs them money whether they say yes or no.
It probably costs them less to say no than to say yes, so having a QVL allows them to say no the maximum out of times for a defensible reason.
RAM production is one of those things where there are not super super high barriers to entry in the market. If someone can make a stick of RAM that works at some given quality level and they can price it really low then chances are they can find somebody to buy it even if the quality sucks. There are a lot of people out there on an extremely tight budget willing to chance it or enough people who aren't smart enough to choose good RAM who only care about the price.
Those people will take bad RAM if it is cheap if they can possibly do so.
For a lot of people, they view RAM as a commodity product where everything is visibly the same and the only thing to do is maximize your bang for your buck by minimizing cost.
In some ways it is and in some ways it isn't.
PSUs are the same way. Many view them as commodities and don't understand why they should pay more for the same wattage. There is a good reason, they just don't know it.
Yes, RAM internals are a lot the same regardless of maker, but different chips do have different properties. A 512 mb chip on a RAM stick that is made in Japan is different than a 512 mb chip on a RAM stick that is made in China. The chips made in Japan are pretty widely known to be better quality and higher price than the ones made in China are. That is just something people have come to accept as a fact of life for the most part.
Therefore the RAM cards that use chips from Japan will cost more and potentially be higher quality than those which use chips from China.
This matters because it applies most to the lowest common denominator, the chips from China. The people who are using unmatched RAM are maximally likely to be in the ultra low budget range.
If they were in a higher budget range, they could just buy 4 x 4 GBs of some kind and just throw away the 2x 4GBs of a different kind they already have and they wouldn't care about it.
The ultra low budget people (I am one of those), however, tend to be the most incentivized to get maximal usage out of what they already have and maximally minimize the cost of new expenditures in order to achieve a given set of goals. This often means they want to buy cheap RAM that doesn't match what they already have because what they already have is more expensive than something else that is available.
So you are really talking about a low quality chip from China being stuck in with another low quality chip from China made by some other company.
Whereas good brand + other good brand is maximally likely to work out of unmatched types, bad brand + bad brand is maximally unlikely to work. You get all the drawbacks and none of the advantages.
It just takes one tiny defect on one RAM stick to prevent a system from booting completely. That is maximally likely to occur with bad brand + bad brand.
Mind you its still quite possible that bad brand + bad brand will give you a set of RAM that has no defects. From the point of view of the manufacturer of a motherboard, though, they don't want to service calls like this if they can possibly avoid it.
All the motherboard maker can really tell you is to send it back to them, they will test it at their own expense, and they will ship it back to you at their own expense. It is in their interest to limit this to the greatest extent possible.
Quite often, if not most of the time, they just test things, figure out that there is nothing wrong with it, and they send it back with a note saying that. A lot of people just RMA things that aren't broken because they don't know what is broken and what is.
Your motherboard maker could probably think that your bad ram is the cause of the problem, but they don't really have any desire to try and test your bad ram. They would rather just tell you to buy something else if at all possible so they don't have to test it. Especially since bad RAM has a habit of working when you don't want it to and only not working when you do want it to work. They could test the sticks for 8 hours, find no errors, and send it back with a note that it is good when it isn't.
Really, having a QVL is the most pragmatic way that motherboard manufacturers can limit the amount of money that people on ultra low budgets can damage their bottom line, that is about all there is to it."
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