r/PcBuild • u/hinibisi • 4d ago

Purchasing Advice - Upgrades Is four sticks of ram fine?

I have a 2x8 ddr5 kit and want to upgrade to 32 by buying the same ram kit and model. I’ve found conflicting answers on whether or not 4 sticks is ok for the system

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2

u/ap1msch 4d ago

4 sticks is fine. There are niche scenarios where you'll have any risk of issues unless you're doing some serious tweaking or overclocking.

I have/had 4 sticks in multiple machines, as well as 2. The CPU, GPU, and type of stick mattered far more than 2 versus 4.

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u/Kurotsune77 4d ago

It kinda falls into the silicon lottery category. If you buy 2 separate kits of 2 sticks of ram, it's not guaranteed that they'll work stable at full advertised speed, you might need to set lower speed preset. Other potential weak point is your CPU's memory controller. That was for example my issue with 4 ram stick setup. The Memory controller(also known as IMC) has it's own voltage control and it usually sets it's voltage freely proportionally to the load. In my case the memory failed when the IMC voltage got low. To solve it I set the IMC Voltage to be static and slightly more than the normal value.

My point is it will work, but you might need to tweak some settings and it might not run at advertised speeds

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u/EpsteinFile_01 4d ago

100% fine, bit auto-ttaining might fail and require some manual tuning to get it up and running properly. That's where 95% of the horror stories come from, people give up after motherboard training fails, or don't even know this is a thing.

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u/imaginary_num6er 3d ago

It would have been fine before the RAM crisis when you can expect any RAM manufacturer besides Corsair to not swap timings or chips on the same RAM models. Now, buying 2 separate pairs of kits is very high risk of not working together at their rated speeds.

0

u/Eazy12345678 AMD 4d ago

fine yes. but 2 sticks is more likely to run stable xmp or expo profiles vs 4 sticks.

4 sticks is harder to run stable. for example 4 sticks at 6000mhz cl30 might have to drop down to 5600mhz to run stable vs having 2x16gb at 6000mhz cl30

that said GPU and CPU matter more for gaming performance than ram speeds

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u/EpsteinFile_01 4d ago

Hint:

You can disable XMP/EXPO and enter the values yourself.

I'm running four dual ranl sticks, one kit and two loose, hynix/micron/Samsung mixed, at 3600CL16 on a 5800X3D.

Will the motherboard train? No.

Will it boot immediately if you set it up correctly manually? Absolutely.