How do I upgrade from 2 sticks of RAM to 4? - Probing Paul #50

excellent team group's dark z series of ddr4 gaming memory features an aggressive yet stylish armored design with high performance aluminum alloy heatsinks to keep thermals in check the dark z series uses specially selected high quality modules to achieve ddr4 speeds up to 3600 with xmp 2.0 support for easy setup and kits are available in capacities of up to 32 gigabytes per dimm perfect for a gaming pc or a high-end workstation click the sponsor link in the description for more and if you're in the us you can also check out their ongoing july giveaway which you can still enter this week hello everyone and welcome back to paul's hardware this is probing paul my monthly q a series and a few special things first of all this is episode number 50. very very happy and proud of that we've made it through 50 episodes of probing paul and it still feels like the first time also this is technically my second episode for the month i already did one at the beginning of july but these have been getting fairly popular recently so much appreciation to all you guys who've been watching them and hopefully they're a little bit more accessible for you now that we've been doing the time stamps down at the bottom so you can jump to whatever question you would most like to see that said uh we must always begin probing paul by looking down the probing paul's of the past there they all are feel free to check out my playlist if you want to dive back into some of the older episodes i usually answer about seven to ten questions per episode so that said let's dive in with the first question this one is from flip floss gaming he says hey paul i love the videos thank you very much i'm keeping my fingers crossed so that you'll answer this i built my pc about a month ago i've gotten into more video editing i'm considering upgrading my ram i have dual channel four dimms i think it means four dimm slots and it has two eight gig sticks currently installed for a 16 gig setup which is pretty standard for uh starter build these days if i were to buy another two sticks but 16 gigs doesn't matter if i installed bigger sticks or higher capacity in the current empty slots versus the ones occupied by the 8 gig sticks so i like this question because it actually seems fairly simple and straightforward and it's one of those things where when you're talking about building a pc you often gloss over i very often recommend getting a motherboard that has four memory slots some of the really inexpensive ones will have just two that allows you the upgrade path to add more in the future but i rarely talk about how you're actually going to do that upgrade and what you might want to take into consideration with memory other than the standard which is ddr4 pretty much across the board right now there's three things you need to consider one is going to be the capacity of course how many gigs per stick are you working with and we're talking about eight gigs per stick right now for 16 gigs total on two sticks but we now have 16 gig dimms so you can have 16 gigs in a single memory uh module and two of those would make 32. beyond capacity though there is also memory speed and it's usually represented by a number like 3200 3400 2666 that's actually the mega transfers per second speed and if you look at your actual operating system or you look at some reporting software it will list the frequency it runs at so 3200 speed memory actually runs at 1600 megahertz but it's double data rate ddr which gives you 3200 mega transfers per second even though the frequency stays the same ddr memory transfers data on both the rising and falling edges of the clock and that's how it doubles the data rate and then there are timings usually referred to as cast latency but these are referring to specific things that the memory does and how often it actually does it this is why lower timings are usually better if a memory is going to perform a task like column address strobe or row address strobe and it does it in 14 cycles rather than 16 that's going to be a little bit faster all that is to say if you're going to take your 16 gig kit and you're going to add another 32 gigs and the other two open slots yes you can totally do that and it will totally work as long as you still use ddr4 memory of course will it then also run at its rated speed typically if you're trying to just go in and plug in xmp settings it's only going to read those off of one of your dimms and if you try to plug in xmp settings for one kit and you have a different kit in there it may or may not work and that has to do with the memory modules in the memory itself and memory manufacturers like gskill will take all the memory modules they produce they will test them to see what speed they're able to achieve on a consistent basis and then they'll drop those into memory kits rated for that speed or lower so the solution that's most often recommended for people who are upgrading from two dimms to four is to buy the exact same kit if you can same capacity same timings that way you can plug in the xmp values for one kit it will apply across all of them and you'll make sure you have modules inside that can run at the speed that you're trying to tell it to run at of course if you want to buy a higher capacity kit then you may or may not be able to find a higher capacity with the same speed and the same timings as the kit you already have in that case you could plug them both in and try xmp values and it may or may not work you could then go back into your uefi bios and manually control the timings and you could probably find something that's sort of a lowest common denominator between the two kits to get it up and running but not everyone likes to go in and play with memory timings that can be a little bit more of a daunting task than just going in and say enabling xmp but then there's one last thing to take into consideration and i think this is one of those things that's less commonly known in the pc building world if you buy a two dim kit with xmp values it's gonna have xmp values for two dimms if you buy a four stick kit all together as one kit it's gonna have different xmp values it will have different settings for four dimms that might be tuned better to work across four dimms than perhaps the more aggressive timings that you might get in your single two dimm kit and that can be the difference between the same memory kit being installed in the same system with the same memory kit next to it and it actually not working rather than working but if i can try to sum up all of this the upshot would be if your goal is more capacity then get those two more 16 gig sticks and just try to find speeds and timings that are as close to the current kit that you already have as possible bearing in mind though that after you install them you might need to go into your uefi and tweak some things in order to get everything running at the right speed alternatively you could just try to find that same exact 16 gig kit that you already have and add it in and then you'd have 32 gigs total but probably a little bit more likelihood of running at the speed that you want to run at i think the best solution for you though although it would cost a little bit more would be to try to find a brand new 64 gig kit that would give you the most memory overall that would give you a kit that you could plug in the xmp values and be fairly confident that it would work no matter what and you would avoid that entire hassle of having to go in possibly to your uefi to tweak speeds and timings in order to get everything running properly so hopefully you guys know a little bit more about memory configurations now again just one of those things that seems simple on the face of it but there's there's always a little bit more depth if you can go into it a bit more next question though is from stephen mason thank you very much steven do you need to reinstall graphics drivers on a new system for a gpu you've taken from a previous build there's a couple ways to read this question if you're taking a gpu from a different build it will not bring the drivers with it no so yes you do need to install graphics drivers from that gpu speaking more generally if you're simply upgrading a graphics card in an existing system you may or may not need to update the graphics drivers if you're using nvidia for example they have a driver package that they distribute that's compatible with a wide array of their various graphics cards so if you're upgrading from like an rtx 2060 to an rtx 2080 chances are you can just shut down your system remove the existing card install the new one the drivers that are already installed to recognize the new hardware and update themselves to the proper settings and you'll be good to go however much like with installing windows and people asking me questions like i upgraded hardware can i use my existing windows installation the answer becomes yes you can and there's a decent chance it will work but what if it doesn't so my answer is always going to hopefully include if it doesn't work if you need to start from scratch if you need to just wipe the slate and start fresh how would you go about doing that so let me walk you through that really quickly the first thing you're going to want to do is go ahead and download ddu or display driver uninstaller which is available over at guru3d.com here's a quick look at the interface although i do believe it might be a little updated from here but you can choose whether you have an nvidia or an amd graphics card installed and then you can clean and restart and this will wipe the drivers and settings and everything and basically give you a clean start so you can install the driver fresh you will need to boot into safe mode though ideally in order to run ddu so after you have downloaded and installed it you can check out this video from 2018 but still very valid today about some shortcuts to accessing your uefi so if you hold down the shift button while you go to restart windows 10 it will take you into this menu right here this gives you some advanced options such as going to a command prompt or startup repair or you can use this to directly access your uefi which is really convenient now i've seen this menu change from time to time with different windows updates but if you click on the see more recovery options you should be able to access advanced startup settings then when it restarts it will show you this menu then you can hit four to launch into safe mode and from there you can go in and run ddu and clean your drivers and then restart from there back into normal windows mode after that i would just download the latest drivers either directly from nvidia or directly from amd depending on what type of graphics card you have uh reinstall them and you're off to the races i hope that helps you out steven next question here is from pack how pa cal just changed my dynamic range to full in nvidia control panel color settings as i've been told it's a better option than the default one after changing it the color seems odd to me in games i don't know if it's just because i use the default one or full dynamic range or if things look worse please share your knowledge and he is using a monitor here 34 actually an ultra wide alienware ips panel with displayport so he's not connecting to a tv so if you open up your nvidia control panel and you go down to change resolution you'll have the resolution you're connected to and it should show your monitors there and everything and then you can do different settings there's a default and there's nvidia color settings and in the past this did use to default or from what i'm reading this did used to default the output dynamic range to limited rather than full and this is talking about when you're using rgb color there's values between 0 and 255 and it limits those values specifically for working properly with televisions that can't actually display the entire range so if you were unlimited and you switched to full and then suddenly things look weird my assumption would be that you're connected to a tv that doesn't have that full color range that said you are not connected to a tv you are connected to what seems to be a fairly decent ips monitor so this might be a question of matching the settings from your output from your graphics card with the settings on your monitor i would dive into your monitors menu settings and see if you can change the color range there make sure that the color range settings match what's on your pc pretty much everyone should be on 32-bit for the color depth but then there's the output color depth and this is going to do tone mapping to match the colors that are capable of being displayed on your panel so here again you can also change between 8 and 10 bit if you have a 10 bit panel you should go with 10 bit and then the color format again is mostly going to be rgb but if you do have a fancier display that can do one of these other modes these have four two two or four four four chroma subsampling and i'm not going to dive into chroma subsampling right now but let's just say the short story here is that 444 is going to give you the maximum amount of color depth so you can go with that if it's an option but again your display is going to need to be capable of this and most of them are just going to use rgb you also might want to double check the nvidia global settings in the drivers versus if there are specific settings for a game that you might be playing that might not have been updated so that might help you out as well but just so you don't feel bad when it comes to color depth output modes uh going from 8-bit to 10-bit to 12-bit there's a ton of detail there a ton of nuance and it's stuff that i'm i'm still trying to learn and grasp and get wedged into my head as well so so don't feel bad and if you want to read a little bit more this is this article's a little bit dated but it's got a little bit of info on nvidia cards not displaying full rgb via hdmi again this is something that i do believe has been updated uh with dr with more recent driver updates limited rgb is 16 to 235 levels of differentiation per color uh versus full rgb which is zero to 255 but this also has a link to this image and you can really quickly just pull this image up and look and you should be able to see white and then a sort of a gray and you should be able to see black and then sort of a darker gray here and that will tell you if you just see a white on the left and black on the right that means you're in limited mode and you should go and try to fix it next question here from alpha zweck hey paul awesome content thank you very much alpha really enjoy watching your videos just want to ask for 2d and 3d modeling and rendering pcs do they have the same demands as video editing and rendering pcs so this is kind of a follow-up to the question i answered uh in the first probing paul earlier in july if so does that mean every workstation will have the same build path the true answer to your question here is that it's going to vary based on the software different software is designed different ways some software is going to benefit more from low latency on a system some software is going to benefit from having a massive amount of memory to work with some software is going to benefit from that memory being very fast memory and some software just wants there to be a lot of it so if you're choosing parts for your system and your plan is to over build it so it's capable of doing the stuff not just that you want to do with it right now but handling stuff you might want to do with it in the future uh yes there's there's a lot of crossover there and a lot of times you'll find the same requirements or the same recommendations uh for your pc hardware with this piece of cad software and this piece of software from you know like adobe premiere or something like that so the generic advice would be to focus on the parts for your computer that have the greatest impact on performance which would be your cpu and how many cores and threads it has as well as the frequency it runs at your memory how much capacity it has how the speed it runs at then the timings and if latency or lower latency is something that benefits the application you're working with storage may or may not be a factor often storage is just an issue of getting software loaded up but if you're working with software that has to pull a huge amount of data off of your storage and something like a high-speed nvme ssd might be something that benefits you and then of course there's a graphics card and the graphics card might have video memory that your software may or may not take advantage of and then your graphics card might also have something like a bit like cuda cores or a built-in video encoder that might also may or may not benefit you again it just depends on the software so i would say hone in on the software that you're working with and then try to look for reviews that have specifically looked at that software and its performance across a range of hardware configurations those reviews are a little bit more niche but when you need them uh they can be extremely helpful next question from norman hexamer hey paul love the show appreciate the content thank you very much norman i'm wondering if there is a cost-effective means to have a gaming pc in my office that streams to my my tv in another room longer to do to get a new pc currently working with something in the core 2 duo range but can't justify having two different pcs in different rooms so you've probably heard the phrase there's more than one way to skin a cat and i've never quite understood where that derives from but the point being there's more than one way to solve the issue that you're trying to solve here norman and i have solved it by just having multiple computers in different rooms but i don't need to do that there are lots of ways to have one powerful computer somewhere in your home that you can also access to play games with or watch other content on elsewhere in your home since you mentioned cost effective the first solution i would recommend is a long hdmi cable and a wireless or wired depending on the location of the gaming pc and where the room is that you want to send stuff to that way you can just run say an hdmi or a displayport cable through a wall or around a wall or something like that to your tv and then you can maybe also have a usb receiver for a keyboard and mouse bring that around as well and then all you have to do is display switch between the two you can have multiple inputs connected so when you're in the gaming room you can just watch on the tv and use the keyboard and mouse that you have there and when you're in the computer room you can just use the keyboard and mouse that you have set up in there and and that should work for you practically speaking that may or may not be possible though depending on again where the room is you want to stream to and where your system actually is if you have more distance between the rooms you might even go something like this it's called uh hd base t which basically is a couple units takes an hdmi input on one of them then you run an ethernet cable from one to the other then hdmi out of the other one and this can let you take really long runs i believe up to like 50 or 100 feet and it also lets you use ethernet cable which can be less expensive than say a really long hdmi cable these range in price depending on what resolution you need and if you're going 4k or not that said this is probably going to add a bit of latency so if you're talking about gaming in particular this might not be a solution that you want to go with the other solution would be to have like a small lightweight client pc in your gaming room that accesses usually over wi-fi or your local network uh your gaming pc and then it can stream content as well as games if you use steam for your pc gaming for example there is a built-in function there called steam link where if you have steam running on two different systems in a home and you have a game installed on one you can play that game on the other system even though it's running on one system all you need is a wi-fi connection there are some requirements for the client pc in that scenario though so you may or may not have a cost effective solution for that you could potentially take your existing core 2 duo system and use that as a client pc to access a newly built system across the network there used to be something called steam link that sold for as little as two dollars and fifty cents but this basically acts as a little client to access steam games from elsewhere on your network the limitation here would be that you can only play steam games so there are other solutions for example nvidia has the nvidia shield that's a little bit more capable they have individual gaming units as well as a shield tv which just is just a little box that you set on there this is useful because it can run by itself and has compatibility with more advanced functions like dolby vision and atmos for hdr as well as ai upscaling going from hd to 4k this is a standalone unit so you can use it to stream netflix and stuff like that and then you can also use it to access a gaming system that you have elsewhere on the network to stream a game across it again there's going to be a little bit of an issue with latency there but it's not too bad from my understanding with the more recent implementations even with all that said though this this is definitely not the only solutions for the problem that you currently have so just trying to throw a few of those out there and if you guys are watching this and you like oh i do this but use a completely different method please leave those in the comment section down below as well as your questions for next time i do probing paul and maybe i can come back to this with some other ideas moving right along i'm going to try to answer the rest of these a little bit more quickly but sadman1471 says how many friend requests do you get on overwatch after showing gameplay and did joe get the monitor from the 60hz versus 240hz gaming video that i just posted last week if you guys didn't have a chance to check it out uh 240 hertz gaming very very effective if you're playing an fps or a shooter i recommend it especially if you want to be competitive to get a higher refresh rate 144 hertz is good too to answer your question though no joe did not get the 240hz monitor it's actually right there my wife and i have wanted to play overwatch side by side and now that we have two 240hz monitors we can do that but i have promised joe that i will work towards getting him a 240hz monitor as quickly as possible the other part of your question is overwatch friend requests i kind of have a method for both steam and the blizzard battle net app or whatever uh which is that my name is very generic so unless you have the little hashtag with the code on the end it's hard to send me a friend request that said ever since i have been streaming on youtube for many many years now i've shown my accounts here and there it pops up it's hard to avoid so i get friend requests all the time short story is i have a long list of active friend requests and every so often i have to go in there and just clear it out because i have no idea where they're coming from and if you add someone as a friend on one of these services sometimes it can give them the ability to to ping you or ask you questions or whatever and often i'm going in there just to play run some benchmarks so i have to sort of minimize distractions like that i do add friends from time to time but it usually goes along with when we do our live streams here is a long question from bc field technician and this is a question that i'm not going to answer because i do not know the answer or at least i'd be taking shots in the dark which i don't usually like to do the question is about linux and using ryzen with linux and i'll leave it here if you guys want to read over it lots of questions good questions it's probably the same questions that i would have if i was diving into a linux configuration but just to be straight up with you guys i appreciate linux i have a lot of respect for linux i have worked with linux a very scattered few number of times and never enough to get to the point where i feel really comfortable with it especially to the point where i can provide advice to other people so i'm going to point you towards someone else who i know is very familiar and comfortable with linux and that is a level one text and specifically wendell over at level one text they even have a level one linux channel specifically dedicated to linux although i don't know how frequently they post videos over there so check out this channel i'll link it in the description if you want to look up some specific videos that might already answer the question that you have you could also uh hit up wendell directly on twitter if you want he's tech wendell and he's really good at replying to questions and stuff like that or you can go to levelonetext.com they have a forum and you might be able to post some questions on there and some helpful folks might be able to jump in and answer your question in a much better way than i can here on the show level one texts i'm happy to recommend them and to round things out uh from my q a earlier in the month there were several people who just seemed kind of blown away by that headphone jack thing that i mentioned and if you didn't see that video the question was about using front panel audio on a computer and i just pointed out front panel audio when you run it through your case and plug it into your header on the motherboard here this header for the mic and headphone jack on the front of the case often doesn't use the same sound device as the plugs on the back so especially if you have nice headphones or something like that plug them into the back and not the fronts it's better in multiple ways and relictus here is just kind of blown away that he's had studio headphones for three years but he's been plugging into the front panel jack and he says my ears thank you i hope you switched and i hope you noticed the difference and i hope that has made your day a little bit better same thing for mark vaughn over here who actually asked the question that i answered last month and in case any of you are wondering he followed up his headset has a quarter inch connector and the back panel has a 1 8 inch connector now mark says it's an older headset and he ended up just upgrading it um so that's already been done but mark just so you know uh this is an eighth inch to quarter inch adapter but they do also have the adapters that go the other way here is a quarter inch to eighth inch adapter so you can plug in your quarter inch headphones on that side and then plug the other end into your eighth inch audio jack on the back of your computer this is about 20 bucks for a nice sennheiser one since it is an analog connection it actually does benefit from having a nicer one that has gold contacts for example if you're truly interested in good audio quality and if you have a nice set of headphones so mark don't check your old headphones because if it's a nice one if it's studio grade those probably still work and you know maybe just replace the ear pads on it and something like that those can last a really long time but hopefully if you did upgrade to new headphones they're treating you well and uh hopefully if you guys are watching this video you have enjoyed it uh that's gonna wrap it up for probing paul episode 50 and again if you guys have questions for me to answer in the next episode leave them down in the comment section below i'm strongly considering taking this from a monthly to a bi-monthly series so let me know what you guys think of that idea as well if you want me to be probed more frequently we we can make it happen uh thanks again guys hit the thumbs up button on your way out we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Paul's Hardware

Views: 177,699

Rating: 4.9463878 out of 5

Keywords: computer, PC, PC gaming, personal computer, computer hardware, paulshardware, RAM, ddr4, upgrade, add more memory, 2 DIMMs to 4 DIMMs, 2 ram sticks to 4 ram sticks, how to upgrade memory, quad channel, dual channel, question, answer, help, probing paul, graphics drivers, gpu swap, gpu upgrade, graphics card, color range, full, limited, 3d modeling, rendering, pc to tv in another room, gaming on a pc in another room, ryzen linux, linux, level1techs, front panel audio

Id: SNXukAraF3o

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020