Will these ram sticks work together?

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Mar 6, 2016
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JackNaylorPE
You have yet more issues

a) two of them require XMP to work and the 1st one doesn't support XMP, that will mean doing all speed, voltage and timing adjustments manually.
b) two need 1.5 volts to run at any speed, the 1st maxes out at 1.35 volts; so dropping the 1.5 sets to 1.35 volts is unsupported thereby taking the wind outta the sails for the down clocking idea... and running the 1st set at 0.15 volts above the rated voltage is a bit scary.

I went looking for game performance comparisons for Rust w/ 8 vs 16 GB and came up dry ... if you know of any, would love to read them.
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While I agree with Jack that many people say and agree you shouldn't mix up ram.... i've never had any issues mixing ram of the same speed, even going so far as to use different brands together in various spare parts builds
 
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don't be afraid of mixing ram sticks together, the worst that can happen is the pc won't boot.
You haven't mentioned what motherboard/cpu you are using but I am assuming it does have 4 ram slots.
Most ram sticks support multiple speeds and timing settings, they should all match after installing but if not you may have to manually set the ram speed in the bios so they match and can work in dual channel "Asyncronous" mode which means there is a different amount of ram in each channel
Hope this helps
 
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They are the same speed 1600mhz, my mobo is GA-990FXA-UD3 MB with 4 ram slots. My worry is that I think the Corsair sticks are CL9 timings and the Kingston sticks are CL11. I'm not sure how I will be able to fix that. All I really need is that one extra 4GB stick so would it be possible to have 3 slots filled instead of all 4?
 
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It's definitely possible to have all 3 or 4 and should work just fine. just try installing the extra 4 gig without messing with the timings it should work automatically, if not check if you can set the timings manually in the bios.
 
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That's my point ...

1. You won't be able to use dual channel as the sticks are different sizes.... this will reduce performance

2. You won't be able to use the CAS 9 RAM at CAS 9 speeds. You will have to slow them down to CAS 11 at best.

3. Going from 2 sticks to 4, especially 3 different RAM specs will likely require additional voltage to remain stable.

It's not about facing the challenge and after hours of tweaking and getting it to 'boot" ... it's about having a PC that performs better when you are done. I don't think that will happen here.

So... possible to get it to boot ...certainly. Possible to have it improve performance, to an extent that it's worth the T & E ... highly unlikely after the double performance hit of relaxed timings and ability to use dual channel

 
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It booted up and according to my BIOS and CPU-Z they are running at 9-9-9-24 latency. Before I turned off my PC to add the extra stick in CPU-Z and Task Manager both said my ram was running at 667 MHz which is normal I suppose because I am running in dual channel. Now that I have added one other 4GB stick which is usable according to CPU-Z and Task Manager I have 12GB of usable RAM it still says my RAM is running at 667 MHz. I'm not sure if this is normal or not but as of now I am running my system with no crashes or notable slow downs. I am going to run a few games now and see how well it performs.
 
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1.It will still run in dual channel asynchronous.

2.Of course the faster ram would have to be underclocked to match the slower ram, or the slower ram overclocked.

3.Not if the faster ram is underclocked.

If OP just needs extra ram this is the cheapest way to get it, they already have the ram sticks.
I agree this is not the fastest or most ideal way to set up your ram,
 
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What are the slow downs that you are talking about when I am using the RAM setup? I'm not even really sure what faster RAM even does for PC performance.
 
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thats normal, the kingston ram needs to underclock to ~666Mhz (1333Mhz effective) to support CAS 9 - Because the corsair ram does not support CAS 11 at all. The corsair ram alone will run at 800Mhz (1600Mhz effective- remember double data rate). So now you have 12 gigs of ram 😀 just slightly slower... keep in mind if you are not using dedicated graphics card, integrated graphics solutions suffer from slower memory!
 
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not much, but it really helps integrated graphics on amd APUs
 
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According to my BIOS it says my RAM speed is 1333 Mhz. Is that talking about all RAM sticks in my system? And also in CPU-Z it only says Channel# Dual not Dual Asynchronous
 
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All of which have a negative impact on performance. I didn't see anything as yet as to what expectations are for the extra RAM. It's all about what the net impact was.... let's say you **might** benefit from the extra RAM 15% of the time that an application needs more than 8 GB, that means that 85% of the time you are going slower. If this is a gaming box, than I know of two games that do better with 16GB than 8GB ... that means of memory even has an impact on performance, the opportunity to realize a performance gain is limited to two games, and the opportunity to have a performance decrease exists with everything else.

I have bunches of old hardware left here in the last 25 years and i have tried to add it to my kids builds or other users who ask about "any extra RAM lying around ?".... in all those instances, rarely saw an observable benefit.

Example: Adding 2 x 2Gb to 2 x 4GB ... most games unaffected... some slight decreases

Example: and this was a weird one. A user with 2 x 4GB of DDR2 (Corsair) wanted to go to 8 GB. I had a helluva time finding anything at same speed and CAS timing but did find a set from Gskill. With it being so hard to find, figured I'd up the 2 x 4Gb Mushkin set in my youngest son's box... so bought 2 sets.

The GSkill added in with the Corsair ... couldn't get hem to play well together.
The GSkill added in with the Mushkin ... couldn't get hem to play well together.

On a whim, I tried taking the Corsairs out of the user's build and added it to my son's ... booted up w/o hitch, no tweaks ... as expected the two GSkills played well together.

I saw this again recently (Z87 / Z97 era) when a user had a set of Corsair DDR-3 2400 w/ 10-12-12-28 timings. After version 4.51 Corsair switched to a less expensive supplier which had 10-12-12-31 timings. The original sets used modules from Hynix, I can't remember who made the newer ones. But Mushkin continued to use Hynix throughout the entire production run so the set of Mushkins I had we tested in his rig and they worked just fine.

Of course 1600 is a lot easier than 2400 ..

Also ran into this recently.... a user brought over his box of stuff to build and he had a 2 x 4GB set of RAM

($63) CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 8GB (2 x 4GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200 CAS 16

He said that he wanted to add another set of this RAM as he realized he wanted 16 GB for AutoCAD. So he would be into this for $126 for two sets of RAM that "might work" together. Here's what we did instead:

Bought ($99) CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 8GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200 CAS 16 and he sold the original 2 x 4Gb set on Craig's List for $50

So instead of spending an extra $63 for 16GB *upgrade* that might work, he spent $49 instead to get 16Gb. He now had a set of RAM that was a) was guaranteed to work, b) wouldn't have the hit that comes with using 4 sticks instead of 2, c) put $14 dollars back in his pocket and d), didn't have to fiddle with voltage and timings adjustments.







 
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Look at CPUz. SPD tab ... 1600 is likely the XMP setting (overcloked setting) which i think you will have to forget about. The 1333 speed is likely the highest JEDEC setting usable for that RAM ... in CPUZ you should see 800 for XMP and 667 for 1333. By the way, that doesn't come from dual channel so you multiply by 2 ... it comes from the 1st D in DDR (Double Data rate)

Look at CPUz. SPD tab ... it will show all possible default settings for each RAM stick

CPU_Z_SPD.png


 
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I am not buying more RAM and I don't plan to anytime soon. I play survival games like Rust which require more than 8gb of memory to run which is why I thought, why not? I have extra sticks lets see if we can get something to work. And as of now it seems fine. 12 GB usable, although it appears to be running at 1333 Mhz it is fine for me.
 
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Like I said before, I agree this is not the best or most ideal way to set up your ram

The performance hit will be negligible, think 1-2fps

He can open more than one tab in chrome now 😀
 
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