I have two Slots in my Lenovo PC. And two RAM Modules on is 8GB with 2666 MHz and another 16GB with 2400 MHz. They Both work fine and I get a total 24GB RAM with 2400 MHz and i think that's because the 8GB RAM down-clocked to 2400 to mach the lower BUS. My question is Which one should be placed in slot 0 ? the 16GB or the 8GB? and will the order affect performance?
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2 Answers
Only two slots? Then the order doesn't affect performance. What will affect performance is that the modules are not the same.
There are two affects at play here.
The first is the clock speed. The speed will be set to the lowest automatically. If you feel confident doing so, you could overclock the memory to get that back, but you probably won't notice the difference.
The second affect here is because the sizes are not the same. This prevents the memory being run as dual-channel, and instead the memory is run in interleaved mode which is slower. You cannot change this.
Best practice is to match your DIMMS. If you had four slots for example, and 2x 8GB and 2x 4GB of RAM (so same total), it would be possible to operate with 12GB of RAM in each channel in dual-channel mode as long as you used the right slots, but you don't have that option with your PC.
You have to ask yourself the question here - do you want performance, or do you need the RAM capacity? If 16GB is enough (it is for most people) then I would stick with the two 8GB modules.
In this case order doesn't matter.
You are correct, the 2666 MHz stick downclocked to 2400 MHz to match the other one.
It would be recommended to use two sticks of the same size to take advantage of dual channel. If you need 24 GB, though, in a laptop there is no way to work around this. For a desktop computer, it would be recommended to use 8+8+4+4 GB and the order would matter - pairs of identical RAM sticks must be installed in correct slots for dual channel to work. Exact order depends on specific platform, though.
answered Apr 3, 2019 at 7:54
