Can I replace one 4GB RAM stick with an 8GB?

I'm putting the horse before the cart, but am getting a Latitude E6530 Monday, with 2 x 4GB of RAM. If I decide I need to bump it up a notch, can I pull out one of the 4GB sticks and add a single Crucial 8GB, for a total of 12GB ( I would make sure all the specs were the same), or do I have to spend for the 2 x 8GB (16GB) sticks and forget the 8GB Dell OEM sticks?

 

Your 12 GB configuration would work just fine.

 

Rep from Crucial said mixing it would work, but not ideally...she did admit it would be a lot better than staying with 8GB OEM. I'll see how things work once I've had it a while. My Vostro desktop has 10GB and never gets beyond 40% usage that I can tell.

 

Ideally, they'd want you buying two 8GB sticks from Crucial. But that's really only because they want to sell you more stuff, not necessarily for performance reasons. The only major thing you have to worry about is that both sticks have the same speed (such as 1600MHz). Rest of the details are just minor.

 

It's also good practice to match the timings whenever possible.

 

This. Also, I'm pretty sure that the sticks have to be matching in capacity in order for them to run in dual channel mode (not that there is a noticeable performance boost).

 

So the only bump in memory you can make from 8GB is to 16?

 

Nah, you could do anything in-between as well. 12GB for example. IIRC, the sticks will be in dual-channel at the lowest-common-denominator, so if you have a 8GB + 4GB config, 4GB and 4GB will be dual-channel, while the remaining 4GB on the 8GB stick will not. Though I might be wrong.

Anyway, honestly the performance difference between dual-channel and non-dual-channel is trivial for most tasks.

 

Sounds good...Thanks Jarhead

 

If you wanted to retain dual channel, yes. As Jarhead mentioned, you can run single channel mode and use any variation of memory.

 

Don't worry about it. As long as you have dual channel of some sort the performance difference is negligible. In an ideal world, matches sizes and timings and brand and type are recommended, but nothing is ever ideal is it? 4GB + 8GB is perfectly fine.