RAM configuration question - help appreciated.

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Hi everybody.

First time posting a question in this section of mmo-champ, so please be gentle.

I currently have an MSI 760G-P43 mobo with a single Corsair Vengeance DDR3 8gb 1600 ram chip.

Owing to an ordering error at work I have on my desk 2 Crucial Ballistix DDR3 4gb 1600 chips which are now mine to do with what I will. All three chips are 1.5V.

Would there be any consequences to using 3 ram chips in the 4 slots on the motherboard? The ram slots appear paired as 1&3, 2&4 so I would put the two 4gb sticks in 1&3 and the 8gb stick in 4.

Basically, will this cause problems and/or throttle the performance of the ram by having slot 4 empty? Am I better off just using one of the 4gb sticks and slotting it into slot 3 to pair up with the 8gb stick?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[vesseblah]

You'll get best performance from having just the two 4GB sticks installed, but differnece between 2 and 3 sticks is less than 5% in CPU performance.

Bigger problem is that old AMD chipsets like the one your motherboard has can be very picky about RAM configuration and you might not be even able to run those three sticks plugged in at the same time (would result in mysterious crashes or straight out BIOS error beeps and no boot). Trying different options with the RAM should not do any permanent damage assuming nothing is overclocked, but since it's old AMD board all bets are off.

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Thanks for the reply. Nothing is overclocked on the system at all so I guess I'll just suck it and see.