Solved! Ram question

[916dave]

Recently purchased an ASUS G53SX-XT1 and was going to install some more ram. I believe it is currently equipped with 2 4gb sticks of PC3-10600 DDR3 ram. It looks like the first available ram slot is pretty easy to get to and the other one a little more complicated. It doesnt say that its dual channel memory, so if I were to add 1 more 4gb stick of matching ram (for a total of 12gb) would that be ok? Or should I go all the way and install 2 more sticks of ram to end up with a total of 16gb?

Thanks and sorry if this is a dumb question, I'm kind of new to this stuff.

 

[inzone]

If you recently purchased the motherboard then you should still have the owners manual and in it will be insruktions for doing what you are trying to do and will tell you what slots to use to do it. Of course the best thing to do is to add two matching sticks but if it is too problematic then I do believe that you can add the one stick and it will tell you that in the owners manual.

 

[holdingholder]

You generally don't want to use an odd number of sticks of ram. Is there any particular reason you want more ram? 8gb should be more than enough and really is about the sweet spot for system performance.

 

[916dave]

Good question. I guess I've always heard that the more ram, the better. Do you not think that there would be any notable performance if upgrading from 8gb to 12 or 16gb?

 

[holdingholder]

Tom's did a whole slew of tests with ram a few months ago and they found that you get some good gains from 2 or 4 gigs to 8 gigs but not much after that.

 

[916dave]

Interesting. I didn't see those tests, I'll check them out to see the results. Thanks for the input, I appreciate it.

 

[lovegigi]

it was nice, i will do it right away

 

[916dave]

I'm not sure how relevernt lovegigi's input was lol.

But i found the article about more vs less ram on here. And looking at the summary, although it might not improve things a ton, it said:
"Other than this, you might want more RAM so the graphics card can allocate more system memory for its own use. We saw this pay dividends in GTA IV, for example. You won't see an overwhelming performance increase unless you're using very memory-hungry programs, but you will get a system with enough RAM for the foreseeable future.

Given our observations and low prices on memory upgrades, this is the time to hunt down a high-capacity memory kit for your system. In the end, it’s never wrong to make a step knowing that it will improve performance and provide some reserves."
http/www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ram-memory-upgrade,2778-9.html

So back to my main question: is there anything wrong with using 3 4gb sticks of ram for a total of 12gb or should I just automatically go to using 4 sticks of 4gb for a total of 16gb? I know that gains prob wont be super noticable, but memory is pretty cheap so why not upgrade a little.

 

[holdingholder]

Since there cheap I would say knock yourself out and get 16, I not 100% sure, but I think they need to be paired to run at full speed. I'm not much of one to talk you out of buying, I just went from 8gb @ 1333 to 16gb @ 1600mhz.(I got it really cheap) Don't really notice any difference, but I guess it's good to know that you've definitely got enough ram.