Looking for advice on possible RAM Upgrade

Hardware Build a PC
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Hi again everyone,

Wow, I am pretty excited about my new build. It has come together pretty nicely. Today, I spent most of the day redoing all the cabling, making it as neat and tidy as my novice hands allowed. I am absolutely impressed with the Noctua NF-A15 HS-PWM chromax Black fans that I swapped into my Fractal Design Define 7 XL Case! Playing with the fan profiles, I can make the system unbelievably quiet, while it is still keeping temps under 62C (so far). I am now awaiting delivery of two more of them … one to throw onto the other side of the Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 cooler, and the other to put onto the back of the case, swapping out the non-PWM Fractal fan that is still there.

I am also considering upping my RAM, but I would like some advice from the forum before I spend that money.

I have already populated my rig with 4 HyperX Fury 32GB 3200MHz DDR4 Ram CL16 DIMM Black sticks in one kit (which is on the QVL as kit #HX432C16FB3K4/128). I am considering getting another of those same kits, or possible only doing a 2-stick kit (#HX432C16FB3K2/64), which is also on the QVL. (Interestingly, the two-stick kit is less than half the price of the 4-stick kit … I guess it’s easier to certify that two sticks work together than 4?).

Anyway, I do NOT see an 8-stick (256GB) kit of these particular modules on the QVL. And I have seen online that it is a gamble to get RAM in multiple kits without possibly introducing problems with the build.

I would love to hear some advice from the group before I try this upgrade. What do you think my odds are that I would get a set that would play nice with the set I already have installed? Are there trade-offs to think about as well? Will I sacrifice some speed by going up to 256GB? Or by “only” going up to 192GB (6 sticks)? Will the extra RAM make the system run significantly hotter than it is now? Anything else?

Thank you to anyone who can give me some things to consider.
-pvs

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I may be a bit out of my league here, but do you actually need that much memory? It would also be helpful to know which motherboard you are using and which OS you intend to use (again, there are memory limitations).

Without knowing anything, I’d say the very first step before looking into potential compatibility issues is first determine is the upgrade even necessary to begin with; are you running out of memory for your use case? If not, the compatibility concerns become moot.

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The rule of thumb is the more sticks you have, the less speed the board will be able to run those sticks at. In your case I don’t think this is actually a problem. Multiple kits is fine assuming they are the same sku.

Send it

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Pretty much yes, especially with dual rank modules.

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Thank you so much, jerm, aduba and mystery! All of your comments are good food for thought. I have also been searching around the web, and taken in some vids on the subject, and I kinda think I’m gonna stay where I am right now.

It would be neat to be able to have bragging rights to a 256GB system, but I think it would be more logical to keep the system a bit faster, and maybe a bit more stable.

And who knows? Down the road a piece, this can always be revisited, and maybe the prices will be a bit lower … or maybe future BIOS tweaks will make faster sticks a possibility. Maybe? :wink:

Anyway, thanks again, everybody.
-pvs

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