- [Dave] Hello, Dave here with a RAM upgrade video.
I'm going to upgrade the memory
on my main workstation, the AV Editor Computer
which is what I'm working at right now.
Currently this has 16 gigabytes of DDR4-2133 RAM.
It's installed as four sticks, four gigabytes each.
I'm going to upgrade to 32 gigabytes of RAM.
The reason for the upgrade
is because I'm starting to get real close to the maximum
when running virtual machines,
conducting webinars and editing large videos.
And you can see this in the task manager that's open now.
Right now, I'm using 13, just about 14 gigabytes of RAM
and only two gigabytes available.
And you can see that up here as well.
So look, the line is all the way up here.
Not good.
We don't wanna really be that high.
For best performance, I like to keep the in use RAM
at about half of the total.
I mean, you know, we're still functioning here,
but I like to do that.
That's kind of a rule of thumb.
Now I'm running a lot of stuff right now,
including virtual machines
which you don't see in the processes tab.
You don't see that there.
You have to go to your performance tab
to actually see all the memory that's being used.
And there's other ways to do it as well.
Other tools in Windows, and also third party tools, right?
So we want to increase the total
so that we're doing, when I'm doing all these things
I don't get real close or use up all the RAM,
and then we run into system performance issues.
Now I just ran a pass mark performance test,
the memory mark test.
And here's all the results from that, which I've saved.
Once we do the upgrade, I'm going to check.
I'm gonna do another test and compare it
and compare the baseline.
And you can see the total score here is 2681, not bad.
That actually puts us at the 89th percentile worldwide
which you may or may not be interested in,
but total score here,
and here's the other information which we'll compare.
Now it's interesting
because I installed this RAM three years ago on this system.
So it kinda gives you an idea of how much RAM really changes
over the course of several years.
Of course, it was somewhat cutting edge when I installed it.
All right.
Now, I also ran HW monitor
which you can see here to check the temperature
of each of the sticks of RAM.
And here's the four sticks.
Generally around 39, 40 degrees.
This one runs a little cooler,
and that's under load right now.
So that's what we want.
And I'm gonna test that again under the similar load
later after we do the install.
Okay, now the problem is that this RAM
is 2133 megahertz RAM.
The problem is that that is not available now
without losing your life savings.
So for example here, here's the RAM that I installed.
This is the RAM.
2133 megahertz, four gigabyte sticks.
I installed four of these when I first built the computer
for 16 gig total, and the total cost was $172.
Now we have some guys out there
that are trying to rip everybody off
for this older RAM charging $179 per stick, right?
So I can't find the 2133 megahertz.
So I decided to go one step higher and go at 2,400.
So it's something to think about.
You may wanna load up on RAM when you first build
because later the RAM might be hard to find
or it might cost you an arm and a leg.
You might lose your shirt on this deal.
And I don't wanna do that, right?
Now I understand you're probably under a budget.
I was under a budget too.
So I did the 16 gig.
RAM is volatile though,
not just the contents of RAM, but the prices are volatile.
Now planning is essential.
The first thing you wanna do is decide what can we use?
Will it work?
Right, so we want to go to our motherboard documentation,
and this computer uses a Asus X99-A motherboard.
We'll go to the specifications here.
Click on that, and make this a little bigger.
All right.
And for memory, it says we can have eight DIMMs.
There's eight slots altogether of DDR4,
a maximum of 64 gigabytes.
And the highest speed is 3000 megahertz, but it says OC
which means overclocked.
The lowest speed which I installed was 2133 megahertz
which was the only speed available on the motherboard
without doing overclocking, which is what I wanted
because it was gonna be my main workstation.
I didn't want to risk any type of overclocking.
Now to do the upgrade I kind of have to,
but I'm gonna minimize that risk
by just going with the first level 2,400.
And what you wanna do is you wanna make sure it'll work.
Now, that means that you have to have XMP,
extreme memory profile enabled
which it could be a switch on the motherboard
or it could just be a setting in the bios or UFI.
And then you have to make sure that the RAM
is gonna be compatible with your motherboard.
So you have to check whatever site you go to.
I went with Kingston RAM,
but whether it's Kingston or Corsair or whatever
you wanna make sure it's compatible with the board.
And then you wanna make sure that that type of RAM
with that overclock on the board
will work with your individual CPU.
And really the only way to do that
is to check and see if other people have done it,
which I have done.
I've checked and made sure that it will work,
but again there's always risk with any type of overclocking.
So you have to be ready for that.
I think we've minimized the risk pretty well.
So we should be in good shape.
So you gotta check the specifications first
and make sure that everything will be compliant
and compatible.
Then we'll go down to the system memory charts,
and you'll see here.
This is an illustration of the board, CPU,
and we have four RAM slots here and four RAM slots here,
and they're labeled here and here.
They're also labeled on the board.
Now if we scroll down farther,
you'll see the various recommended configurations.
There's other ones that you could do
that may or may not work, but usually it's a good idea
to go with the recommended config.
You know, these guys that are building the boards,
they do all this testing.
Currently I have four sticks,
so they are in one stick per channel, A1, B1, C1, and D1.
That's what we have, but I'm doing an upgrade,
and I don't wanna use these sticks just yet.
I might incorporate them later
but that should be a separate process altogether.
I'm installing a different speed RAM.
So we wanna make sure that that new speed of RAM works
before we do anything else.
And that's what this video is about.
And it's a two stick kit.
So this is the config right here.
We wanna do B1 and D1.
So that's what we're gonna do with that.
And always check this stuff and have a plan ready
before you actually go through with the install, okay?
So we have a plan,
and let's go ahead and do the actual upgrade.
Okay, so we have our computer here,
and I've taken the case cover off, and you can see inside.
And here is our RAM.
We've got one stick, two sticks, three sticks, four.
These are gonna come out.
Now before you do anything,
you wanna make sure you have
your antistatic protection set up, which we do.
And these are easy to take out.
You need to release them by pressing to the side
with this ear or lever or lock
whatever you wanna call it tab.
And so we'll do that for each of these.
You can do that with a tool.
If you use any tools,
make sure you use something plastic, not metal,
but if you can fit your hand in that works also
as long as you're grounded.
So we'll do this one, and you just press it to the side
and it clicks.
Do the next one and the last ones.
Okay.
That loosens them.
Then we can pull them out.
Now, when we do that
we wanna grab from both ends and pull up simultaneously.
We wanna make sure you're not moving from side to side
with the RAM cause that could damage the contacts.
So we're gonna try to pull straight up as much as possible.
And so we'll do that now.
Take this first one out.
Grab from both ends.
Pull straight up.
Okay, and always try to handle it from the edges if you can
so that we don't damage any of the chips or contacts
or circuitry.
And then you wanna have an antistatic bag available to you
or more than one or old RAM containers to put that RAM in.
So we'll put that to the side, and we'll remove the rest.
Pull on the second one.
Again straight out with both sides at the same time
holding from the edges, and I'll do that with the rest.
Okay, so we have no RAM.
We have no memory.
System can't do much without memory.
So here is the new memory.
And like I say, this is, I'm putting in 32 gigs,
32 gigs of RAM.
So here's one stick, and we've got another one.
So they come in their RAM cases.
I'll take those out.
And before we do so wanna make sure that we know
exactly where we're installing those.
And if we look at our documentation here,
we see that we wanna use the B1 and D1 slots.
Previously, we were using A1, B1, D1 and C1.
So what we want are the slots that are open right now
that are closer to the CPU.
So that's this one here.
That is B1.
And this one here, which is D1.
To install the RAM, we take it
and make sure we're just holding it by the edges.
And you wanna line up the notch in the middle there
into the slot properly.
So for this one, we have to turn it around
and then we can place this directly into the slot.
So it's gotta be placed straight in.
We'll press down, and when we do so,
it should lock automatically.
You probably heard a snap,
and it locked in.
That is our B1 stick.
And we'll do the same for the other one.
Now for this one, it's gonna go in the other direction
because the slots on the other side are reversed.
So this time it's gonna go in this way.
Find the correct slot.
And it's a little tight in here.
So sometimes you might have to one hand it a little bit.
Try and carefully not to touch any of the circuit boards.
Slide straight in,
and then we'll press down until it snaps into place.
There we go.
And what I was doing was I was applying even pressure
to both sides trying at the same time
so that we don't bend the RAM,
and we don't bend the motherboard too much.
You might have noticed it did have some movement
even though there's some standoffs
on the motherboard between the motherboard and the case.
There is always also a little bit of movement.
Never force it though.
If it feels like it's not going, try not to force it.
Okay, so that is the RAM install.
The physical install really doesn't take very long.
And so what we need to do now is just check
make sure there's no contact showing.
Make sure it's indeed pressed all the way down,
both of those and double check the slots.
We wanna make sure that we are installing
to the correct location,
and that's in your motherboard documentation.
And I'm looking at that now.
And it does look good.
B1 and D1.
Sometimes they're labeled on the motherboard.
Sometimes it's hard to find,
but in this case it's two slots away
from this side of the CPU and two slots away
from this side of the CPU.
You can count that off from the documentation also
in case it's not numbered or diagrammed well
on the motherboard itself.
All right.
So let's case it up and get into the bios or UFI or both
and check it out.
Okay, so I plugged everything in on the computer
and entered the bios.
Here's our UFI bios utility for this ASUS X99-A board.
And it sees that we have 32 gigs of RAM,
DDR4 2400 megahertz.
Here's one it's in B1.
And here's the other, it's in D1 as expected
because we did that according to the manual.
And so that looks good.
Now you may wanna go further.
You may wanna go to advanced mode
and go into the tweaker here.
The AI tweaker for this.
We see the DRAM frequency is 2,400.
So it picked that up automatically.
Now I mentioned, there's an XMP switch.
That's the extreme memory profile by Intel.
Other boards will have something similar.
Sometimes you might have a switch for this
on the motherboard.
This motherboard does.
So in some cases you need to enable this,
especially if you want to overclock.
If we look down here, and we look at the DRAM frequency,
you'll see that we can make changes here.
Now the memory frequency is good.
We're at 1.2 volts.
So that's good.
Capacity's right.
Frequency is correct 2400's what we want,
but you can go further.
And in fact, this board goes all the way up to 4,000.
It only supports up to 3000 megahertz,
but we could actually do that.
We could, overclock further.
Overclock with caution, of course.
So if I was to take the other RAM that I have
that runs at 2133 and place that in separate channels,
then I'd have to increase that frequency for that RAM.
May not work at all,
so that's a whole nother video altogether,
but again just remember if you ever have to do
any over clocking you may have to enable that XMP switch
on the motherboard or enable it here in the bios
and then configure the frequency that you wanna go to.
But actually, everything looks good here right now.
So we've got our RAM, and we should be good to go.
I'm gonna reboot the system,
and we'll be back in the windows section,
and we'll do some testing and benchmarking
and finish it out.
All right.
So we booted into Windows, and Windows 10 started perfectly.
And so I'm here in the system window
within the control panel.
And it's a basic place to go
to see if you have the right installed memory.
We have 32 gig here, and everything looks normal.
So that's the first place you can go.
Second place we can go to is the Task Manager.
And we can see here,
we're using 4.1 out of 32 gig, about 13% right now.
So four gig in use, and that's typical.
And then we have available 27.8 gigs.
So 32 gig total.
Looking good so far, we'll bring up CPU-Z,
and I'm in the, here's the memory tab,
and it shows the DRAM frequency here.
And that's 1200 megahertz.
Previously this was 1066 to give a total of 2133.
That's the internal frequency of the RAM.
That's always gonna be half of what it's marketed as,
the internal clock, not too important for the A plus.
So you just double that we get 2,400.
We're good.
If we go to SPD here, we do see DDR4 2400.
It identifies it.
All looks good here.
And that's slot three that has one of those.
And slot seven has the other guy.
Those are the slots that we're using for the RAM.
Okay, so those are some tools you can use
to take a look here.
CPU-Z is a third party program,
Task Manager is built into Windows, of course.
And so let's bring up the pass mark memory test.
This is performance test 9.0, and we'll do the memory mark.
And we'll run that now.
Okay, so the performance test finished
for the memory mark and the results are just slightly better
than what we had originally.
And originally you could see the results here.
Not really much different,
and this partially depends on what's running on the system.
So I did it the same way with nothing running,
and honestly this could be better or worse
depending on when you do the test.
Results can vary.
But if we look at the final number here
we see 2681 and here 2710, not much of a difference.
And I didn't really expect much of a difference
even though it's 2,400 megahertz.
It's not really that big of an increase
when it comes to working with RAM.
Now the old RAM, the 2133
that was using all four channels.
That was set up as a quad channel.
This is only set up as a dual channel,
but quite often dual channel may test worse,
but it really behaves and performs pretty much the same
when you throw real data at it.
So that's something to think about,
but at some point I might turn this into quad channel.
Either I'll add two more sticks that I've already added
or perhaps try to use the old memory
and try to use them together.
One way or another, but it's good enough as it is now.
This is fine.
The key is that we want the 32 gig
because I wanna see what happens to this RAM amount
when we run those virtual machines.
So I'm gonna bring that up now,
and we'll start a couple of these up.
I've got three that I was running before.
We had Windows seven.
We'll power that guy on.
Windows server 2016, we'll resume that one,
and Windows 10, and we'll resume that one.
Okay, and it's looking good.
Everything's starting up.
And it's utilizing about the same amount of RAM as before.
It's just that we now have the 16 gig available
so we could do a lot more.
I can do a lot more of the things that I need to do
simultaneously on this one system.
And everything's kind of booting up at the same speed,
but with a lot of these software benchmarking applications,
you may or may not exact, exact results.
So we're gonna do a little bit more testing with that
and see how that does.
As of now looks good.
All the virtual machines are running,
and everything looks like it's running well with this.
And so that's about it for this video.
It all looks good.
So in this video we removed the four sticks
of DDR4 2133 RAM.
And we installed two new sticks of DDR4 2400 RAM,
upgrading the total RAM from 16 gig to 32 gig.
Okay, I also checked the temperature of the RAM,
and the temperature looks good in the bios
and also with HW monitor
but the system does appear to be running well,
and it should be able to handle just about anything
I throw at it over the rest of its lifespan.
So that's it.
This is Dave signing off,
and I'll see you at the next video.