Upgrading my RAM and my Overclock

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I have a feeling I might regret this line of thinking but it could mean a better upgrade for me in the long run so here goes...

4 years ago I bought my CPU, Motherboard and RAM (in sig) from 'another' retailer as an overclocked bundle as I had no clue how to do it myself.

This week CoD AW came out and needs more than 4GB of RAM, now I was going down the route of buying a new overclocked bundle from OCUK but then wondered if I could just buy more RAM for my current system?

I have always assumed that replacing the RAM would ruin my overclock, is this correct? If so, how hard would it be to get it set back up for someone that has no idea how to do it?

Getting new RAM would mean I could pick up a new GPU instead of replacing all the other bits.

Any help and advice would be great.
 
best thing to do is copy all your bios/oc settings down,write them down if need be

and yeah you can add in another 4gb of ram you might need to use more qpi/vtt voltage with 8gb

what motherboard are you using?
 
I have a ASUS P7P55D-E.

Would the overclock settings not be slightly different if adding more RAM, also how closely does the new RAM have to match?
 
try to match your existing ram voltage/speeds can be the same or higher,timings can be same or lower than your current ram

and it shouldn't affect your current oc apart from needing a bit more memory controller voltage dram vtt I think its called on asus p55

but makesure you copy all your current oc settings down as adding in the new ram might reset the oc to default idk
 
I was in the same situation, got my [email protected] bundle from ocuk over 4 years ago with 2x2Gb 1600 corsair xms3.
I've since needed to increase ram in order to use solidworks at home so put a set of 1600 2x4Gb crucial upgrade sticks in and they ran fine, I took the corsair sticks out because I didn't think they would play nice with the new ram.

Whilst chasing performance in arma3 I put the corsair ram back in to give me 12Gb in order to run a 4Gb ramdrive for streaming off. I've had no compatibility issues (apart from my ga h55m ud2h doesn't like mixing single and double sided ram sticks!) with the overclock and now have it running stable at 4.62Ghz with ram sitting at 1760Mhz with 1.5v :)

I have had to slacken off the timings to get the speed but all 4 sticks are running at the 1600Mhz profile of the crucial sticks.

As you're not planning on pushing the ram faster than 1600Mhz you shouldn't need to alter anything; put the ram in and assuming it posts boot into memtest and let it run through to ensure it's good to go :)
 
I have ordered another 4GB, the exact same RAM as what is already in it.

So it would seem that just adding it in without changing anything is actually an option? I guess I wont know until I try.

Thanks for all the answers so far.
 
If it's exactly the same you should be fine. I had a P7P55D-E Pro running 16GB (4x4GB sticks) and it didn't hurt the overclock at all. The only thing you may have to change when running 4x sticks is maybe increase the IMC voltage a notch or two.
 
Silly question I expect, how will I know if I will need to do that? Will the system be unstable?

Second silly question, how likely are all the bios settings to reset by just adding more RAM?
 
It should register the increased ram capacity on post, simply boot into memtest86 using a usb stick and run it through, mine takes 45 mins a pass with 12gb. If it passes memtest ok, run prime95 in windows to see if any instability shows up; if so up the imc voltage by one increment and restart prime95, if not you're good to go :)
 
RAM in, 8GB all recognised and overclock still in place.

All seemed fine, until it had been on an hour when suddenly odd noises started coming through my speakers? Loud popping like noises, didn't sound great.

Bit worried something is wrong now?

Edit: Memtest completes with no errors.
 
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