Hey everyone! I built my PC about a year ago with an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and a Rog Strix X670E-F motherboard. At that time, I included 2 x 16GB Corsair DDR5 5600 CL36 RAM sticks. Recently, I've noticed I'm hitting around 90% RAM usage during multitasking, so I'm thinking about upgrading to 64GB. I know AMD performs better with 2 sticks versus 4, but I'm curious if adding another 2 x 16GB sticks of the same RAM would significantly impact performance. What do you all think?
5 Answers
There’s a chance it may not boot if you add those same 2 x 16GB sticks, and you might have to reduce clock speeds to 4800-5200MT/s for stability. It depends on your motherboard and luck. If you tweak the timings yourself, you might get back to 5600, but there's no guarantee.
In general, the rule is that 2 sticks are better than 4, and 4 sticks will generally perform worse than 2 sticks. However, you can run 4 sticks, just don’t expect the same performance as with 2.
My suggestion would be to just get a 2 x 32GB 6000 CL30 kit instead. It's generally better for stability, especially since 2DPC (Dual Rank, Dual Channel) setups can be pretty finicky with speeds. You'll likely achieve better performance this way.
Mixing RAM kits can be risky, especially on AMD platforms and even more so with DDR5. It's best to stick to one kit to avoid potential issues down the line.
Apologies, I've always known mixing different RAM is bad, but I did not know that using the same RAM from different kits was an issue. Thought they were identical.
AMD can be pretty picky with RAM, but since your current sticks are already a lower speed, you might make it work with the new ones depending on your specific setup.
Thank you, looks like I'll be doing that!