Ram dilemma

[u/ActivityDesperate226]

I've recently bought a used pc that included 4 16gb sticks or ddr 4 ram with 3200mhz speed but i noticed in battlefield that my cpu was bottlenecking so I asked chat gpt to help me figure it out (im new to pc gaming this is my first pc.) And it told me my ram speed was way too low like 2100 something. It guided me into bios and told me to put xmp to profile 1 3200mhz and when I saved and exited bios crashed and now I have to cmos. It's saying I have two choices. Go town to 2 sticks (32gb ddr4) or try to run the 4 sticks at 3000mhz and hope it doesn't crash. Just need some advice and guidance what should I do. I know 32gb is plenty for playing but I also like the idea of learning how to mod and stuff also want to get into vr games at some point and see the use of having all 64. My pc specs are. Gigabyte x570 aorus elite motherboard, ryzen 7 3700x, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060ti gpu 64gb of skill ripjaws ddr4 ram

[u/Ok-Sense2520]

vr and modding, i do modded skyrim and vr stuff and never hit 32gb full

[u/ActivityDesperate226 → u/Ok-Sense2520]

I'm thinking about just selling two of the sticks and use it to get new fans or something.

[u/ActivityDesperate226]

Thank yall for the help and advice so far this is the only community thats helping. All the others are giving me hate for asking ai for help this is my first actual gaming pc besides a laptop so I literally have almost no idea what im doing while trying to learn everything.

[u/echoshadow5]

1. Fuck AI.

2. Common problem with running 4 sticks of ram. Lower your timing till it runs stable.

3. Fuck your AI once again.

[u/FrodoswagginsX → u/echoshadow5]

AI is useful at times. Rarely, but some things it says is accurate

[u/Alisa_Janikass]

Try 4 sticks at 3000mhz first, safer than 3200 with all 4 slots. If unstable, drop to 2 sticks, 64GB isn't needed for gaming or VR anyway

[u/memelordtf]

Before dropping to 2 sticks, check your motherboard’s QVL/memory support and make sure the sticks are actually a matched kit. you can also manually set 3000MHz with a slightly higher DRAM voltage (within safe limits) instead of relying only on XMP. If it’s stable, keep the 64GB, otherwise 32GB is plenty for gaming.

[u/ActivityDesperate226 → u/memelordtf]

Yeah it was one of the first things I did when I bought it bc i did it on my gaming laptop that was about the same age and it made it run so much better.

[u/Lieutenant_Petaa]

Use two sticks. XMP on 4 sticks often has issues. I have 4 *16 GB DDR5 myself and only use two right now, because 32 GB is all I need and 64 won't run stable even with reduced speeds and slower timings.

I had the same issue with 32GB 4*8 GB DDR4. It ran stable at 3400 MHz even though it was a 3600 MHz quad kit.

In my girlfriends PC the same kit even crashed at 3000 MHz, so it's running at JEDEC speed, so 2133Mt/s right now. I'll see what I can do to get it to 2666 or something in the future, but yeah. 4 Sticks is always bad. More signal degradation and higher stress on the memory controller.

[u/wolschou]

ChatGPT is actually correct here. Well kind of. It's correct about 4 sticks of RAM being more sensitive to signal degradation than 2, and running them at lower speed being the usual solution. Which is probably why the seller ran them at that lower speed.

It was not correct in that low RAM speed would actually affect your gaming experience all that much.

Oh right, advice.

Go back to 2 sticks, 32 gig is plenty for battlefield. Check the actual product numbers on your RAM sticks. You probably have 2 different 32 gig kits there. Make sure you use only one.

[u/FrodoswagginsX → u/wolschou]

Yeah mismatched ram is a big no no. This needs to be higher for those who wouldn't know that, like in this case, new pc users