Mixing memory?

I have a Asus P6T WS motherboard with an I7-920 cpu. I'm upgrading to a Xeon but not today. I currently have 6GB of ram. Specs are Corsair Dominator 2GB x 3 (6GB), 1600Mhz, 1.65v, 8-8-8-24. The motherboard has 6 memory slots, basically 2 banks of 3. I have acquired a set of Crucial Ballistix Tactical 4gb x 4 (16GB), 1600Mhz, 1.35v, 8-8-8-24. Is there a way I can mix and match these chips? I was thinking on putting 3 of the Tactical in one bank and the 3 Crucial in the other bank. Or should I remove the Corsair and run the 4 Crucial chips and leave 2 slots empty? I'm not overclocking and until I get the Xeon the ram will be running at 1066Mhz anyways. Ideas?

The specs are close enough between the sets that it should work. However, there may be incompatible subtimings or something else that prevents them from working.

Only way to know is to try it if you have both sets. Won't hurt anything and the worst that happens is the system doesn't run or it crashes.

To be safe would it be best just to run the 4 Crucial sticks? I plan to buy another matching set of 2 more Crucial to fill all 6 slots in the future. I would then get rid of the Corsair. Would that be a better idea?

I'd suggest running three of the Crucial sticks so you take advantage of triple channel. Once you get the remaining two, then use all six.

Thank you so much. I'll go with the 12GB for now and store the 1 stick until I get the other pair.

dcapper said:

I have a Asus P6T WS motherboard with an I7-920 cpu. I'm upgrading to a Xeon but not today. I currently have 6GB of ram. Specs are Corsair Dominator 2GB x 3 (6GB), 1600Mhz, 1.65v, 8-8-8-24. The motherboard has 6 memory slots, basically 2 banks of 3. I have acquired a set of Crucial Ballistix Tactical 4gb x 4 (16GB), 1600Mhz, 1.35v, 8-8-8-24. Is there a way I can mix and match these chips? I was thinking on putting 3 of the Tactical in one bank and the 3 Crucial in the other bank. Or should I remove the Corsair and run the 4 Crucial chips and leave 2 slots empty? I'm not overclocking and until I get the Xeon the ram will be running at 1066Mhz anyways. Ideas?

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The first consideration is determining how much RAM do you need to comfortably do what you want to do. The product of that amount and 1.5 should be less than than or equal to the intended RAM. So if you need less than 8GB or equal to 8GB of RAM, use the Crucial Ballistix Tactical set in 3 x 4GB configuration. Otherwise, consider more memory.

If other RAM is still wanted, select that for which the total of all RAM exceeds sufficiency by at least 50%. The next consideration would be which RAM would do so at the highest performance and what costs are acceptable. If you are working only with what you have, the additional 1 x 4GB stick of Crucial Ballistix Tactical set might be best (performance loss: triple channel possibly lost); otherwise, use the 3 x 2GB Corsair Dominator set (performance loss: increased memory latency). You may also consider running the different RAM channels with different timing configurations; I, however, have no experience with such.

If still more RAM is needed, acquire it if possible.

The last consideration is to determine what timings at a given frequency to run the RAM. This should be determined by what RAM you have installed. If you have original dumps of the SPD memory module's data or a text reference of their registers, I can examine them for you to calculate/recalculate timings. The SPD data might contain (encoded) serial numbers.