2 Brands, 4 sticks, dual channel?

[Caldezar]

Just curious... If I have 2 4gb kits of RAM (both 2x2) and they're 2 separate brands with the same voltage required but different latency; could I run them together as 8gb dual channel if I manually set latency? I'd like to buy another 4gb for my Primary PC, but I don't want to buy an 8gb kit. But I also don't want to play the lottery on whether or not they'll work together.

I'm also curious if different speeds would work together? If I bought an 800 kit, could I clock my 1066 to match and keep dual channel?

[MarkOne]

Why you don't just buy the same G.Skill 4gb 1066 .... is it because they are not available ?

[canmx120]

Why not just try? Ram is one of the easiest things to swap out. And there's no reason why it would damage hardware.

[Arinoth]

I think he may be worried about having to return it if it doesn't work (which is a pain in the ass especially if he bought it online)

[bwm]

I've done that on several builds and had no problems whatsoever.
Give it a try first and take corrective action if it doesn't work out as hoped.

[Perineum]

If you already have the RAM just cram it in there and make it do a few passes with memtest. If it works, well..... then it works.....

[Caldezar]

Why you don't just buy the same G.Skill 4gb 1066 .... is it because they are not available ?

I was hoping to find another 4Gb used actually. When I bought my 4Gb kit it was $65. Now the same kit is $115. It's ridiculous!

I think he may be worried about having to return it if it doesn't work (which is a pain in the ass especially if he bought it online)

Sort of. I don't want to buy a 4Gb kit used off someone and find out it's not gonna work. Then I'm stuck with an extra 4Gb kit. I suppose I could resell it, but it's a pain.

If you already have the RAM just cram it in there and make it do a few passes with memtest. If it works, well..... then it works.....

I don't have the ram for it. Although I suppose I could test it with the stuff that's coming for my other PC I just bought on here.

[Daygard]

I have 2 different sets in my rig with diff timings, you just have to set them manually to whatever settings work.

I couldn't resist a G.Skill 4gb set a few months ago for 40$

[frontier204]

I have that happening on my brother's Dell box; actually it's a mix of DDR2 533 and 667. Whatever (slow) defaults the Dell motherboard set seems to work, given that it passed memtest and a few months of BOINC.
I know when I was mixing different sticks of PC133 many years ago, things weren't so happy and the computer wouldn't post with certain combinations of the several sticks of RAM that I had lying around.

[Zero82z]

You should be able to do that with no problems. The motherboard will just change the speeds and timings of the faster kit to match the slower one (for example, if you have one kit of DDR2-800 5-5-5-15 and one kit of DDR2-1066 4-4-4-12, the motherboard will run them both at 800MHz and 5-5-5-15).