8gb ram 2x 4gb sticks

Vekiq

Vekiq

Vekiq

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Joined
29 Jan 2007
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Scotland
Hi All,

From what i remember in the past, your OC performance would drop with every additional stick of ram you add to the board.

If 2x 4gb sticks are used, what are the benefits and shortfalls when compared to 4 gb of ram in 2 x 2 gb stick format?

I am mostly concerned about OC capabilities loss with higher amount of ram, or would that be a factor if i used 2 gb sticks to achieve 8gb of ram?

Thanks in advance
 
I have been looking at this option as well as I bought an overclocked i5 bundle last year. This bundle had 2 x2gb sticks of ram and I was going to upgrade to 2 x 4gb sticks of the same make and stats. I think it is the corsair xms3 ones I was considering.
Dave
 
Hi, on two occasions when using four sticks of ram I was unable to overclock to a decent level. On one occasion with a q6600 and also with my current i5. Only whilst going to 2 sticks of ram I could overclock to the levels you would expect. I would seriously recommend you just stick to two sticks of 4gb. That's what I'm currently using and it causes less problems than the four sticks of 2gb I had before. Apparently more sticks adds more stress to the memory controller.
 
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good question as i was just about to post the exact same thing i currently have a 955BE @ 3.8GHZ with 2x2GB of dominator ram and was thinking of upgrading to 2x4GB sticks but am seriously worried about losing my 3.8Ghz overclock and at £110 it's a big gamble to take so would love some solid information from anyone who has tried it
 
from what i have gathered by reading around, 2 x 4gb sticks are the way to go to achieve best balance between gb`s of ram and OC capabilities, now we just need someone who tried it to confirm if thats correct
 
Vekiq said:
from what i have gathered by reading around, 2 x 4gb sticks are the way to go to achieve best balance between gb`s of ram and OC capabilities, now we just need someone who tried it to confirm if thats correct
Click to expand...

correct. We found testing 2x4GB kits for a total of 8GB worked just aswell (when OCing) as 2x2GB kits.

It only becomes a lot harder once all the memory banks are filled. As this put a lot more streess on the IMC.
 
I'm disappointed to see that filling all 4 banks reduces the overclocking potential of a system.

I wanted to start off with 2x4gb and eventually add 2x4g more to bring me to 16gb (I use memory intensive sw).

I wanted to go for a 2600k Sandybridge system and eventually overclock to about 4.6ghz. Is this likely to be impossible with all 4 banks filled?
 
NathWraith said:
correct. We found testing 2x4GB kits for a total of 8GB worked just aswell (when OCing) as 2x2GB kits.

It only becomes a lot harder once all the memory banks are filled. As this put a lot more streess on the IMC.
Click to expand...

NathWraith,

Has anybody at OcUK tested the reduced overclocking with all banks filled? Are we talking a drop of a small % or is it more serious than that?

Any chance of some tests being done? :D
 
Well, I went to 4 x 2gb sticks of ddr3 not too long ago and had no issues running my i5 760 at 4GHz.

Ok, was only running memory at 1100Mhz due to it being very standard stuff which I am not bothered about testing OC potential on. And the fact that upping memory to high speed smakes little difference to anything other than benchmarks, this did not bother me.

I am sure it will affect OC potential, but when you get to a certain point on OCing, you start to see diminshing returns - for example maybe I could get to 4.2 more easily, but would it really do anything for me.

Though I guess some may experience total system instability when trying to run anything over stock with 4 banks filled, for me it hasn't had a huge impact.

Gone back to stock anyway (on cpu and gpu), as nothing I am doing right now really benefits from the extra speed.
 
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