Using 4 slots? {advice needed}

PieterOosterheert

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Mar 28, 2014
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Hi guys :)

My mobo has 4 DDR3 ram slots on it. A friend of mine has 2x2GB RAM left for me real cheap. But I want to have 8GB in my build. Now can I use all my 4 slots with 2GB RAM or will that result in complications? And should I just go with 2 new 4GB sticks. Oh and I'm looking to OC in the future, will that change the situation? (thinking about heat & competability problems. My mobo is an ASUS M5A97. and my friends RAM is ocz gold.
 
Solution
What kind of RAM do you have in there now? You don't want to be mixing RAM if you can avoid it.

Overclocking RAM doesn't really show improvement for gaming, but for applications like photo editing, rendering, video editing, etc you can get marked performance increase with faster RAM.

polke45

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Feb 22, 2008
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I'll say 4x2GB ram is better as more channel mean better performance. I recommend you getting the same ram or same latency at least so it is not bottleneck.

OC ram doesn't make any difference at least your cpu needs to support that clock speed. Say Your CPU supports up to 1600mhz. If you overclock your ram to 1866mhz, it doesn't make a difference since your cpu doesn't support it.
 

PieterOosterheert

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Mar 28, 2014
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I mean OCing the CPU, does that make a difference, sorry for that and many thanks for the quick answer :D
 

polke45

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it does make a difference for OC your cpu when increasing ram size, but it really depend what program you use. If it is heavy software like Adobe, games, 3d modeling, and etc, then it would be a noticeable improvement.

For small applications, slight improvement.

Usually if you have a small ram size, the pc tends to use your hard drive as ram as well which is known as page. Your cpu needs to process the data to move the data from the ram to your hard drive. This could eat up your cpu. If you have a good amount of ram, this process is not being use thus freeing up your cpu process.
 
What kind of RAM do you have in there now? You don't want to be mixing RAM if you can avoid it.

Overclocking RAM doesn't really show improvement for gaming, but for applications like photo editing, rendering, video editing, etc you can get marked performance increase with faster RAM.
 
Solution

PieterOosterheert

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Mar 28, 2014
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I got 4slots on the mobo, and a set of 2x2gb OCZ gold 1333 but another set would be too expensive, do you have a cheaper alternative? (preferably below 50$)