Amicus717 Posted January 15, 2020 Share Posted January 15, 2020 (edited) Hi folks, I use a Gigabyte X99 SLI motherboard with 8 RAM slots, and which is designed for quad channel memory operation. Right now, I have 4 of those slots filled, with 4 sticks of Corsair Dominator Platinum 4gb RAM (16 gb in total). A buddy of mine has passed along to me four Corsair Dominator 8gb memory sticks that he is no longer using, and I was going to swap them into my motherboard, bumping me to 32gb (a long awaited upgrade, as I could really use the extra RAM). So far, so good. I am wondering if it would be possible or wise to put the original 16gb of memory into the four remaining slots, and bring my total to 48gb of RAM. That would mean 4 sticks equaling 32gb memory in one set of slots, and 4 sticks equaling 16gb of memory in the other set, all operating in quad channel mode. Would this kind of asymmetrical installation work? Would it likely be prone to crashing or otherwise be unstable? I don't want to just give it a try, as this is my main audio PC and I don't like taking chances with it. I've heard that this kind of setup may be problematic, depending on motherboard, and I was curious if anyone has insight into the matter. Thanks, Rob Added note: both sets of RAM sticks have identical stats, aside from the memory size. Both are 2666mhz RAM with the same memory timings, etc. Edited January 15, 2020 by Amicus717 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Roseberry Posted January 17, 2020 Share Posted January 17, 2020 You can try... FWIW, To eliminate compatibility issues (instability), you generally want ALL sticks of RAM to match 100%. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oneofmany Posted January 17, 2020 Share Posted January 17, 2020 As a general rule, if the sticks are the same speed and have identical internal timings, and are correctly banked, there should be no issue. The main problem occurs when sets with the same speed have different internal timings and the system attempts to run the higher latency memory too fast. Grant Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slartabartfast Posted January 17, 2020 Share Posted January 17, 2020 Free to try in your case. Be sure that all of the same type of memory is populating the specific sockets assigned to the same channel. Some of the more recent UEFI's can correctly read the memory specs for two different speeds and run the two channels at appropriate speeds for the memory installed. If you mix them in the same channel the best you can hope for is that it may run all the memory at the speed of the slowest stick if it will run at all. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Fogle Posted January 17, 2020 Share Posted January 17, 2020 The Gigabyte website has a webpage for the motherboard. The webpage indicates the motherboard can accept up to 128 GB of ram. There is also a picture on the motherboard webpage that shows how the sockets are grouped. If you want 100 percent certainty the two sets of DIMMs are compatible, install a hardware identification program like CPU-Z that can tell you everything there is to know about the DIMMs. First run the program with the original set of DIMMs. Swap out the DIMM sets and run the program a second time and then compare the results. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Roseberry Posted January 18, 2020 Share Posted January 18, 2020 Note that mixing RAM with different memory chip config can cause issues. Having the same timing alone doesn't eliminate all compatibility issues. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
craigb Posted January 18, 2020 Share Posted January 18, 2020 3 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said: Having the same timing alone doesn't eliminate all compatibility issues. I tried to explain that to my friend's band too... ? 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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