Hi, this is my second post today but this one is for my own rig. I want to upgrade my amount of RAM to atleast 8GB. Currently there are 2 sticks of ddr3 ram in my motherboard one 4GB and one 2GB. Should I upgrade the 2gb stick to 4gb or should I buy a new kit? I'm not sure because some people say that you need ram that matches the brand, type, speed, latency and voltage while other say you only need to match the voltage. If the first is true it seems like a pain in the arse to get the upgrade from 2gb to 4gb because the ram that is currently on my motherboard is quite old. My relevant components are:
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H61m-S1 (1155) (2 ram slots) *2 x 1.5V DDR3 DIMM sockets supporting up to 16 GB of system memory *Dual channel memory architectureSupport for DDR3 2200(OC)/1333/1066/800 MHz memory *modulesSupport for non-ECC memory * To support XMP memory, you must install an Intel 22nm (Ivy Bridge) CPU.
You're right RAM is very cheap at the moment and the difference between buying 8gb and 16gb is not big enough to say no to 16. Whilst I don't really need it at the moment, it might be quite future proof.
Depending on what you are doing 8gbs can get used up pretty quickly i upgraded to 16gbs because playing 64bit games like battlefield 4 was eating all the system ram up and crashing my computer due to a lack of resources.
Are you sure that was the issue. I pretty much doubt that 8gb of ram were not enough. Systems don't crash because they run out of ram - they cache the least used information on the hard drive/ ssd.
But yes, 16 gb of ram is not a bad idea considering how cheep they are.
I'll leave it at that if you want to but eye candy and mantle don't take up RAM. And 64 launcher permits the application to use more than 3 Gb or use files larger than 3Gb but that doesn't necessarily mean it does. You can simply see in task manager how much memory an application uses.
Edit2: You can see correct memory usage in task manager if you don't alt-tab (ex: if you have 2 monitors) or use this http://www.hwinfo.com/download.php . The link in the first edit takes you to the answer.
I believe the only thing you have to be concerned with is voltage. Brand, timing, and speed don't have to match but it's often recommended to use identical sticks for "best operation." Make sure your motherboard supports non-identical sticks though. However, if you get a faster speed of memory and you have slower sticks installed, the slow sticks will act as a bottleneck and force your faster stick to work at their speed. Some boards have compatibility problems running certain brands or models in dual channel, so always check your manufacturer's QVL (Qualified Vendor List) for a thorough listing of sticks they've successfully tested.
Matching pairs must match in:
Capacity (with exceptions for certain Intel chipsets in Flex Mode)
Thanks for all the help! I decided to go with 16gbs of Crucial Ballistix. Now I can run WoW and more than 15 tabs of wikis and guides! Not that much of an improvement for bf4 because of my GPU haha. But I can let Steam, Origin, GOG, Battlenet, Spotify and firefox run in the background now which is nice :)!
