I recently scored a pair of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200MHz CL16 RAM sticks for free from an old PC I found in my rental unit. It felt like a sweet deal until I realized these sticks differ from my current setup, which includes a 2x8 Corsair Vengeance kit running at 3600MHz CL18. Is it possible to mix these two RAM kits?
4 Answers
There’s a chance you might face stability issues, but usually, these kits work out fine if they all run at the same speed—essentially at 3200MHz in your case. The advice about never mixing RAM isn't always true, but it might require some tweaking to avoid problems. If you're hitting the limits of your current RAM, the capacity gain will likely outweigh the minor speed loss.
You can mix them, but you’ll probably have to play around with the settings to find something that works well together. It's best to run both at 3200MHz for compatibility, but it could take some effort to get the timings right.
I was surprised how easy it was! No problems so far, just plugged them in and I’m good to go.
Yes, you can mix them, but they'll run at the slower speed. In your case, the system should automatically downclock everything to 3200MHz, which seems to be what happened!
That's exactly what happened with me! My PC recognized all the RAM and downclocked it to 3200MHz seamlessly.
You can definitely give it a shot! Worst case, it might fail to boot if the setup is too picky. I suggest trying the new RAM alone first, and if that works, add your other sticks and see how it goes. Sometimes, you'll get lucky and have it recognize all RAM correctly at a slower speed.
Thanks for the tip! I was nervous, but I just plugged them in and it booted up instantly, just like before.
Thanks for the insight! I'm already seeing improvements with framerate in games. This definitely worked out!