RAM Upgrade

[ASH2755]

Just bought an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Tower as an upgrade to the DC7700p I have had for years. I can highly recommend it for those worried about upgrading. It is solid and well-built and smart too. Very pleased with it and wish I had upgraded before. HP really are far and away the best. They provided support for my old CMT PC decades after purchase. 

I would like to buy some more RAM for it. Would a 4 x 8GB kit be better than 2 x 16GB or is there no difference?

I have no idea what to buy. Apparently, Corsair is a good brand but these days neither Amazon nor some of the eBayers accept questions about anything including compatibility. It's also a bit worrying these days re cheap Chinese copies on eBay and  Amazon and even years ago got caught out on some Kingston data sticks.

Would be very grateful for any advice on this.

Thank you.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

The PC will support up to 4 x 16 GB of DDR4 memory.

Do you need 64 GB of memory?  Probably not.

But it depends on how much memory your PC came with.

If it came with 1 x 8 GB of memory, and you want to upgrade to 32 GB, then you can buy 3 more 8 GB chips.

However, if it came with 2 x 8 GB of memory, then you have a choice of buying another 2 x 8 GB of memory or you can furture-proof the PC by adding 2 x 16 GB of memory and have 48 GB.

That's what I did with my Dell PC equivalent of yours--the Optiplex 7050 MT.

I also have an Elitedesk 800 G3 in the desktop mini form factor.

This is the memory I recommend you buy for your PC:

Two or 3 of these (as applicable) if you just want 32 GB.

Crucial 8GB DDR4-2400 UDIMM | CT8G4DFS824A | Crucial UK

Two of these (if your notebook already has 2 x 8 GB).

Crucial 8GB DDR4-2400 UDIMM | CT8G4DFS824A | Crucial UK

If you only have one 8 GB memory chip, do not buy 2 x 16 GB of memory unless you are willing to remove the 8 GB chip or the memory will not run in dual channel mode.

Below is the link to the service manual:

c05382325.pdf (hp.com)

[ASH2755]

That is very helpful, thank you.

It did come with 1 x 8 GB of memory, so perhaps I could buy 3 x 8GB of memory. Don't they need to be paired anymore like they used to?

I don't game but do work fast and work with images and have lots of windows open, etc. wonder whether having 64GB of RAM would make the PC much faster - would I really need that much? Or not?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Personally, I think 32 GB will be fine.

You can check your Windows resource monitor now with the 8 GB memory chip installed and see how much free space you have with 8 GB.

The resource monitor for the Dell PC (an older model Optiplex 7020 I'm using at the moment) which has 32 GB of memory installed ( 2 x 8 GB), indicates that I have 27,620 GB out of the 32 GB of memory free.

Yes, you can just buy 3 of the Crucial 8 GB memory chips and fill all 4 of the memory slots and it should work fine with the memory chip HP installed.

You could also buy one 8 GB memory chip and 2 x 16 GB memory chips and have 48 GB of memory.

If you install 2 x 8 GB of memory and 2 x 16 GB of memory, you install it in matching pairs in alternate slots.

For example:  16 + 8 + 16 + 8, or 8 +16 + 8 + 16.

[ASH2755 · Accepted solution]

Looked around for several hours and saw that it's not easy if you want to keep costs down. Crucial ship from the US to the  UK with free shipping but with the likelihood of 30% duty on top of their already high prices, Amazon had four sticks of Crucial for £80. I thought one stick spare would be good as I plan to get a back-up PC as at about £100 that's a whole lot cheaper than getting an engineer in and spare parts.

Went on ebay and got the same thing for £48 from what looked like sellers who had upgraded to 16GB and were selliing the 8GB sticks. 

So problem solved and thank you very much for your help.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.