Not necessarily. Incompatible memory kits CAN work, but they often are at the mercy of other factors. No two systems are EVER exactly the same. Ever.
The memory kits are not the same. Ever.
The CPU is not the same. Ever.
The motherboard is not the same. Ever.
What they are, is similar. Same model, means "similar", not same. Two different memory kits can't always achieve the same results when overclocking OR when being used together, and by the same token they can't always achieve the same results when being used with other hardware. In fact, unless they came off the same production run and have serial numbers that are in series with each other, and possibly not even then, they may not even be compatible with each other. If they didn't come from the same production run they might not even use the same components to make up the module, because at different points in time the manufacturer may change up the makeup of the model BUT keep the model number because technically the overall aspect, being the speed and timings, primarily remains the same. That does not however mean that they "are the same".
As seen here:
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/amd-ram-compatibility.3210050/#post-19785792
Probably, if they work on his system they OUGHT to work on yours, in theory, but what makes sense in theory does not always prove truthful in reality. Also, there may be differences in your silicon, meaning, your CPUs. No two CPUs are exactly the same either, hence the "silicon lottery". Some are better than others. One may be stronger than another. One might be more capable at any given clock speed than another and in fact be able to run at that clock speed with a higher margin of stability WITH a lower amount of voltage. Lot's of variables that COULD be in play. I'm not able to say that they ARE, however, the basic rule of thumb is that if the memory kit is not listed on the MEMORY MANUFACTURERS compatibility lists, you are going to chase ghosts and are setting yourself up for a bad day. It's as simple as that.
Yes, memory, any memory that is the right "kind" of memory, CAN work on any given board given a adept enough tinkerer and enough time, usually. Whether it can run at the rated speed and timings, or with all the sticks in the kit, is another story.
As far as memtest is concerned, Memtest is a good basic indicator of problems with the physical memory. It can tell you if the memory ITSELF is screwed up or not, AND it can sometimes tell you if there are problems with the configuration. There are however a lot of things it can't tell you and this is highlighted by the fact that there are additional tests provided in the PAID version of Memtest86 that are not included in the free version. Obviously, if there were not OTHER problems that could exist that the free version does not detect there would be no NEED for the additional tests OR a paid version.
Fortunately there are OTHER ways to test the memory further, although it is STILL not an absolutely conclusive end result. I've seen, MANY times, memory that passed ALL software testing but the problem was only resolved by replacement of the memory kit with a new kit. It's just that simple. You can however try running the Windows extended memory diagnostic test AND this test, outlined below.
Final testing with Prime95
It is highly advisable that you do a final test using Prime95 WITH AVX and AVX2 disabled, and run a custom configured Blend test. You can also use the Blend mode option as is, but after a fair amount of personal testing, asking questions from some long time members with engineering level degrees that have forgotten more about memory architectures than you or I will ever know, and gathering opinions from a wide array of memory enthusiasts around the web, I'm pretty confident that the custom option is a lot more likely to find errors with the memory configuration, and faster, if there are any to be found.
Please note as this is rather important, if you prefer, or have problems running version 26.6 because you have a newer platform that doesn't want to play nice with version 26.6, you can use the latest version of Prime95 with the Custom test selected but you will need to make the following change.
In the bottom of the Torture test selection popup menu there will be some options for disabling AVX. I recommend that you do so, not because we are doing thermal testing and require a steady state workload (Which AVX wouldn't affect anyhow, as Computronix explained to me), but because the last thing you need during memory testing is having to worry about CPU temperatures, and you will, with AVX enabled.
So, uncheck the option for AVX2. That will un-gray the option for AVX, and uncheck that box as well.
Now open Prime95.
Click on "Custom". Input a value of 512k in the minimum FFT size field. Leave the maximum FFT size field at 4096k. In the "Memory to use" field you should take a look at your current memory allocation in either HWinfo or system resource monitor. Whatever "free" memory is available, input approximately 75% of that amount. So if you currently have 16GB of installed memory, and approximately 3GB are in use or reserved leaving somewhere in the neighborhood of 13GB free, then enter something close to 75% of that amount.
So if you have 13GB free, or something reasonably close to that, then 75% of THAT would be 9.75GB, which, when multiplies times 1024 will roughly equal about 9984MB. You can average things out by simply selecting the closest multiple of 1024 to that amount just to keep it simple, so we'll say 10 x 1024= 10240mb and enter that amount in the field for "Memory to use (MB)". We are still well within the 13GB of unused memory BUT we have left enough memory unused so that if Windows decides to load some other process or background program, or an already loaded one suddenly needs more, we won't run into a situation where the system errors out due to lack of memory because we've dedicated it all to testing.
I've experienced false errors and system freezes during this test from over allocating memory, so stick to the method above and you should be ok.
Moving right along, do not change the time to run each FFT size. Leave that set to 15 minutes.
Click run and run the Custom test for 8 hours. If it passed Memtest86 and it passes 8 hours of the Custom test, the memory is 100% stable, or as close to it as you are ever likely to get but a lot of experts in the area of memory configuration suggest that running the extended Windows memory diagnostic test is also a pretty good idea too.
If you get errors, (and you will want to run HWinfo alongside Prime95 so you can periodically monitor each thread as Prime will not stop running just because one worker drops out, so you need to watch HWinfo to see if there are any threads not showing 100% usage which means one of the workers errored and was dropped) then you need to either change the timings, change the DRAM voltage or change the DRAM termination voltage, which should be approximately half of the full DRAM voltage.
There are also other bios settings that can affect the memory configuration AND stability, such as the SOC, VCCIO and system agent voltages, so if you have problems with stability at higher clock speeds you might want to look at increasing those slightly. Usually, for Intel at least, something in the neighborhood of 1.1v on both those is pretty safe. There are a substantial number of guides out there covering those two settings, but most of them are found within CPU overclocking guides so look there in guides relevant to your platform.
As a further measure of assurance that your WHOLE configuration is stable, you can download and run Realbench for 8 hours. If the system freezes or fails when running Realbench with your full memory amount set, try running it again but select only half your amount of installed memory.
There might be something else that you find useful here, IDK.
In the beginning, there was......BIOS Before you go ANY further, go to the manufacturer product page for your specific motherboard model AND revision. Revision is an important aspect because for any given motherboard there may be more than one version of that model which will be identified...
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