Can I combine PGS34G1600ELKA with PSD38G1600K/KH ??

[BrianSNJ]

Hello all,
Have a Gigabyte GA-MA790GPT-UD3H board and at the time the recommended Patriot memory product was PGS34G1600ELKA. HOWEVER, I have only been able to get it to run stable by setting the speed/voltage to 1333/1.8v. The RAM speed of 1600 is not fully supported.

Situation -
I am building a new Ivy Bridge rig and this old gaming system is going to be used as a workstation that I use for testing and running VMWARE VMs on. Therefore, I need this to be trouble free! lol

I know I can just buy PSD38G1600K or PSD38G1600KH to give me 2x4GB of RAM and that would be fine. BUT could I combine this with the old 2x2GB of PGS34G1600ELKA, to give me 12GB of RAM total with nice, stable performance? Board is running Windows 7 64 bit so it will see all the RAM and mobo supports up to 16GB of RAM.

[Patriot_Ben]

Hello,

Yes you should be able to use them together as they should have the same base programming.

You probably might not be able to get it running at the PGS 1600 9-9-9 specs but you should be able to find a spec in between or downclock it to 1333.

[BrianSNJ]

OK. I'll give it a go. 8GB will be enough...but more...12gb...would be sweet, especially for running the more demanding VMs I have. lol

[BrianSNJ]

@Ben
I ordered the PSD38G1600KH RAM. Would you mind advising me on setup and settings? Would you put the newer RAM 2x4GB in the primary DIMM slots then add the older PGS34G1600ELKA 2x2GB after or would you leave it as is and just add the new RAM? I plan on testing with Memtest any way and if no errors occur, I will skip testing the new modules one at a time.

What settings, etc. would you advise in the BIOS?

For reference - this is how you helped me previously with this setup. Nothing has changed.
http://www.patriotmemory.com/forums/...-MA790GPT-UD3H

But as I stated in the first post above - I have only been able to get the old PGS34G1600ELKA to run stable by setting the speed/voltage to 1333/1.8v. The RAM speed of 1600 is not fully supported.

[Patriot_Ben]

It's tough to say since this is not a configuration we'd test.

So to be honest, I would simply plug in the memory use the specs you're at now and take it from there.

I would try 10-10-10, if the 9-9-9 isn't stable. Please advise.

[BrianSNJ]

Hey Ben,
RAM was delivered literally 15 min after I posted this...so here is the result.

I left everything as is. Added the new RAM to the open DIMMs, turned it on, checked the BIOS to see if all was well. Checked settings. Setting were the same - Speed 1333, 1.8v and everything else was set to AUTO.

Booted into Memtest+ 4.20 and been running tests ever since. Almost at 3 passes so far and no fails.

Memtest reports 12GB 666MHz (DDR1333) CAS : 9-9-9-25 / DDR3 (64bits). All is correct and matches BIOS.

Looking good!