How To Add Ram To your Computer

so you've got yourself a pc it probably has somewhere between 4 and 16 gigs of ram but you're in a situation where you want or maybe need some more i have totally been there in fact i recently upgraded my personal desktop from 16 to 32 gigs of ram and in today's video i'm going to walk you through how you can do that yourself [Music] all right so the first thing we need to get started off with is if you can even upgrade your ram in the first place now there are a few things we need to look at the first is what the total ram capacity of your motherboard is if you built the system yourself then head over to trustypcpartpicker.com click the search button and type in the name of your motherboard for me that's asus rog strix x370e my motherboard is getting pretty old so it wouldn't show up in the list of current motherboards but the specs are still listed on this site if for some reason you just can't get yours to show up go ahead and just google that beast and locate it on the manufacturer's website as i would imagine their records are kept more up to date than pc part pickers anyways once you find your motherboard specs you should be able to then see a maximum memory field a number of dim or memory slots available and a list of compatible speeds all of these things will be important later when it's time to look for some ram to purchase if you didn't put your pc together and you got it from a company like hp or dell then you'll probably need to search for their product page and find the same three bits of information there note that if you can't find the number of memory slots on the motherboard that's generally fine we'll be looking at that later directly on the pc anyways as a verification measure and you can just get it there if your current amount of ram does not meet the maximum amount of ram you're good you can officially upgrade the amount of ram in your system up next is choosing the right memory kit for your system to do this we're going to head over to our esteemed friend and colleague task manager with task manager open click the performance tab and then select memory here it tells us the current speed of your ram that you've got in your system how many slots are used how many total slots there are and even the form factor of the ram although for anything other than a laptop this is most likely to just be dim d-i-m-m if you're in a situation where you've got two out of four populated then you're sitting just about perfect to add another two however if you've got two out of two or four out of four populated then you'll need to replace at least some of the ram in your system generally speaking you want one two or four of the tips populated so plan your purchase accordingly and also if you are replacing ram note the size of the ram you're replacing and just make sure to get however much more than that that you'll need for example if you've got two sticks of four and you're wanting to upgrade to 16 that means you need to get two sticks of eight to get up to that number but you get it it's just me if you do have a system that you built it's easiest to match the ram that you currently have in your pc as long as it's available and you know what it is for me that was the case so i got a 16 gig kit it was a 2x8 kit kit of corsair lpx ddr4 3000 i decided to get black heat spreaders though to get that sick black and white aesthetic if you didn't build your own system it isn't a bad idea to pop open the case at this point and see if you can't find the brand sticker and get any additional information about the ram in your system if you don't want to or can't do that at this point though just match it the best you can you can mix and match ram at least to some extent but all the ram in your system has to run at the same speed so even if you get much faster ram and put it in with some slow ram the faster ram will run at the same speed as the slow ram this isn't necessarily a problem but the faster ram is usually a bit more expensive and if you don't need to spend the extra money why spend it right up next is usually to wait for shipping and then install it as soon as it gets to your door to install the ram you'll first have to turn off the computer and to disconnect all the wires on the back of your computer before randomly pulling everything out it is a good idea to look back there and get a good idea of where things go but you can probably guess most things just based on the shape of the connector it's basically like those shaped toys as a kid just with more squares and pins and stuff and really they don't let you mess up connectors as much as they used to usb is usb hdmi is hdmi and they're all different shapes up next there should be some sort of thumb screw or other retaining device that is keeping the side panels from randomly falling off on your computer you'll need to take at least one of these side panels off to get a good view of the motherboard for my fractal design mesh if i see there are four large thumb screws holding the glass panel on removing those allows me to take out the glass and extremely carefully set it somewhere safe because it's glass and i really don't want it to break and that will give me access to my system with the side panel taken off grab your new ram take it out of the box and open the tabs of the empty slots unless of course you don't have empty slots then press the tabs on the sides of the existing ram that you're planning to take out and pull those sticks out with the tabs open line up the little notch in the ram with the notch in the slot on your motherboard and press firmly down on the stick of ram when it's properly seated you should hear a click with the ram installed it's never a bad idea to go through and clean any dust filters that you might have on your pc while you've got it on the workbench maybe give it a spray out inside so it looks great once that's done you can either plug your computer back into the cables that it was connected to before or install the side panel back on you're gonna have to do both either way it's just up to you the order if you're not super confident that you've got it right it is usually best to leave the side panel off until you're booted up and for sure working but if you're feeling risky throw that side panel on and see what happens on my first boot i usually like to enter the bios and make sure everything is good to go with the ram being recognized and the right amount and speed being listed there now there is one thing that i learned while doing this with this specific machine and that is that if you're currently running an xmp profile you should disable and re-enable your xmp profile anytime you add new ram because well if you don't you might spend hours resetting ram reseeding ram troubleshooting being nervous you got bad sticks of ram and just overall being very frustrated because that's exactly what happened to me eventually i just ended up disabling xmp and everything started to work fine at 2133 megahertz which is generally the default speed of ram and then i re-enabled xmp and everything has been working fine i'm not sure exactly why that is necessary or even if it's always necessary but if you are running an xmp profile like me i thought you should know it might make a ram install more difficult than it used to be speaking of ram like we've been doing this whole time what kind of ram how much and what speed are you running at as you saw in this video i currently like 32 gigs around 3000 megahertz while you're commenting down there with your ram speeds don't forget to hit that subscribe button we make these videos weekly and we'd love to have you as part of this community thanks so much for watching and i'll catch you in the next one you

Channel: The Tech Guys

Views: 17,847

Keywords: dtech media, dtech, New ram, additional ram, install new ram, diy, build your own PC, how to build a pc, how to install ram, how to see if you can install ram, can i upgrade my ram, upgrade your ram

Id: kGPszSs4b20

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020