I filled all four RAM slots on my motherboard, and it caused months of GPU crashes
Populating more slots isn't better when it comes to DDR5, and I found out the hard way
The writer's personal experience with filling all four RAM slots on their motherboard led to months of GPU crashes. They ran their system with four 16GB sticks of DDR5-6000 RAM, believing it was a mild configuration decision for performance. However, this setup proved unstable, causing both RX 9070 XT and RTX 5080 cards to crash.
The crashes originated from GPU driver timeouts, affecting both AMD and Nvidia cards. Initially, they blamed the drivers, but after experiencing similar crashes on a second GPU, they suspected the issue lay within the motherboard, CPU memory controller, or the RAM. Memtest86+ revealed numerous errors, pointing towards the RAM as the culprit.
Once they removed one kit and turned on EXPO, the system became stable again. The writer concludes that while 32GB is sufficient for gaming, 64GB was more of a productivity necessity. Filling all four slots with four-stick configurations, even when validated as a set, can lead to instability due to the increased load and messier signal path for the memory controller.
They recommend using a single kit of 32GBx2 DDR5-6000 instead to avoid potential compatibility issues.
Written by urgent.news from XDA Developers's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
