Is it bad to have mismatched RAM sizes (16, 16, 8, 8)

I recently manage to acquire myself a whopping 48GB of RAM (two slots of 16GB and two slots of 8GB), but then a friend told me that it is not very optimal, and that I'd be better off using 32GB because that amount is better used by the OS (In this case, Windows 10).

Is that true? Is it better to use 32GB than 48GB?

2

1 Answer

Two factors:

1. It used to be that cache in the CPU would only cover a certain amount of RAM, causing accesses outside of that to be slowed down. Examining the information about the CPU and chipset in use will tell you if this still holds and what the boundary is.

2. Some (all, really, these days) CPUs and chipsets can perform parallel access to RAM modules in different slots, making access faster. If the modules in a bank are of different size then parallel access is not possible. Again, details about the CPU, chipset, and motherboard will tell you how large a bank is and which slots belong to which bank. Memory geometry

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