Hey everyone! I put together my PC about 4-5 months back and have been experiencing some frustrating freezing issues that last anywhere from a few seconds to a minute. I usually have a ton of tabs open in Google, which I know isn't ideal. I thought I was covered since I got 4 sticks of 32GB DDR5 RAM. However, I've heard that using 4 sticks can lead to stability problems. Do you think that's what's causing these issues? Here's a quick rundown of my build:
- Motherboard: ASUS Prime Z790-A WiFi 6E LGA 1700 (compatible with Intel 14th, 13th, & 12th gen) running Windows 11
- CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-14600K 3.50 GHz
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
- Storage: 4TB total through 3x 1TB NVMe SSDs and 1 SATA SSD
- RAM: G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB, Model: F5-6000J3636F32GX2-TZ5NRW with 2 kits of 2 x 32GB modules (DDR5-6000) for a total of 128GB.
Any thoughts?
4 Answers
Honestly, 128GB might be more than you really need for just Chrome tabs and gaming. If stability is an issue, consider simply going down to 64GB. You could also dive into your BIOS settings for stability research with your Z690 chipset.
Running 4 sticks can mess with signal quality and impact maximum frequency, especially if XMP settings aren't stable. Have you conducted any stability tests yet? Are you currently using XMP?
I haven’t run any stability tests before. I’m following the first suggestion now and downloading OCCT.
For sure, using 4 sticks of DDR5 RAM can lead to instability. One recommendation is to disable XMP and run at stock speeds to see if that helps. If you're primarily concerned about RAM capacity rather than speed, this might be the right approach. You could also try running with just 2 sticks and keep XMP enabled for better performance.
I mostly went for 128GB just to be safe, knowing I keep a lot of tabs open. But if I can reduce that without any issues, that’s cool too! I'm checking out what OCCT is and will give your suggestions a shot after testing this.
It sounds like a good plan to run a RAM stability test using OCCT. If you encounter any errors during the test, try lowering the RAM speeds incrementally from 5600 to 4800 MHz. Stability can often improve this way.
I'm running the OCCT test now; it's been 13 minutes with zero errors so far. However, I did notice a lag spike earlier. My memory usage looks low, so maybe it’s testing my CPU more at this point.
On the support page for my motherboard, I can't find anything about supporting 4 sticks of RAM—only 2. Does that mean it just doesn't support 4 sticks, or is it not listed?