When I built my pc I bought 16gb (2x8) of ram. For the Christmas season I decided to gift myself 32gb (2x16). Both sets are ddr4 and run at 3200mt/s but are of different brands. Is it okay to put them in the other two ram slots or should I replace the old ones?
I have seen this, and other notions of its ilk, written many, many times lately. This is not an attack, just setting the record straight.
I should point out at this juncture that although system tweakers pathologically hyperventillate over transfer rate, RAM timings and minuscule latency differences between this RAM stick or the other one, in reality this is pretty much the least impactful factor on your system performance there is. Anyone can delve into this if they like. Tl;dr: “large” differences in DDR5 transfer speed amounted to a real world difference of only 4 to 10 percent, for very specific tasks, from the very lowest end to the very highest end. Woo. Without fixating on benchmarks it’s unlikely anyone would notice a less-than-10% difference, and basically impossible to notice 4%.
It’s also quite unlikely that any modern board and processor combo would not be able to run all (typically 4) of its memory slots at their full rated speed anyway.
More memory is always better than less memory with a marginally “faster” configuration. Even the difference between dual channel or forcing your board to run in single channel mode is not going to be significant for tasks that are not bottlenecked by sheer memory throughput. For normal users – including gamers – the number of tasks that will be memory bottlenecked you will encounter are zero. Even in single channel mode a stick of DDR4-3200 should be able to transfer at roughly 12.8 GB/sec and there is no storage device on Earth you can put in your computer that will fill it that fast. In order for that to ever be a factor, your workflow will have to require everything you’re doing to not only already be within RAM, but stay there for the entirety of the operation and never touch any disk.
You may theoretically notice a marginal difference if you are doing heavy duty video editing, big time cryptography, or deeply important scientific computing work like folding proteins or something. Otherwise it literally does not matter. Having enough memory capacity to not have to hit the swap disk at any time is much more important.