I am replacing my motherboard. My current mobo has 2 RAM slots and I only ended up buying 8gb of RAM. I ordered exact RAM (same make, model, speed, size etc) again as new mobo has 4 slots.

I could setup new mobo with 8gb now, format and reinstall everything. However will my comp moan when I add more RAM in a few days when it arrives? Resulting in a format now (after mobo change) and a format then after RAM increase

Anyway my question is when installing new RAM will the comp whine and be all weird about things being different, or will it just accept the new RAM and deal with it?

New mobo is Asus Z87-Plus, nothing fancy as I am not a gamer, I don't really need anything extreme for what I am doing. The RAM I have now and the one ordered is Corsair 2x4GB so in total 4x4GB, again nothing fancy or extreme.

Edit: I don't mind waiting but im impatient and Amazon have been rather sloppy in dispatching the RAM (still in 'Dispatching Now' stage) figured I would get the mobo out of the way, but if another format is required when I do I may as well wait.

It won't complain, you can install more RAM or take some out without reinstalling.

Good enough for me, see you all in 20 mins :D

Most operating systems have an upper limit on RAM it will recognize.

Here are the limitations on physical memory for Windows systems. If you have Win8 or Win7 Professional or higher you'll be fine.

I just plugged in the new RAM and it functioned fine without any reformats or OS installs. I didn't change the motherboard though.

Since my computer is 32 bit, I was only able to go from 2GB Ram to 3GB.
32bit hardware and 32 bit OSes can only address up to 4GB, including (I think) the videocard's RAM and RAM used by other pieces of hardware.

Since I already had 512mb in the videocard, and maybe a piece of addressable memory might be used by other pieces of hardware, if I stuck in a 4th stick of RAM, most of it would go to waste (if I understand correctly, which I might not).

Yeah, 32 bit windows can only address at maximum something like 3.5 GB of ram. Frankly, that's not really enough these days, which seems pretty crazy when I think back to my first 486 that came with a 100 MB hard disk and maybe 8 or 16 MB of RAM...

Yeah, 32 bit windows can only address at maximum something like 3.5 GB of ram. Frankly, that's not really enough these days, which seems pretty crazy when I think back to my first 486 that came with a 100 MB hard disk and maybe 8 or 16 MB of RAM...

And 20 years from now 8-16gb is going to seem like 8 to 16mb.

The 486 was also on the order of 50-100mhz, and even cell phones today are not only exceeding 2ghz, but also running 2-4 cores.

edit: And in 20 years 2-4 cores is going to seem pretty small. Unless a whole new underlying hardware architecture is developed though, it's unlikely we'll see a 2-3 order of magnitude increase in processing speeds, though I wouldn't say it's an impossibility.

I have the exact same Mobo, the same brand of ram, and I did the same thing(except I went from 8 to 12) and it worked. So you should have no issues.

Its Win8 64bit, been a proud 32bitter (minus win server 2012) until last month when I needed to use After Effects. I was just worried I would have to format and do everything again although I have to admit the super speedy full reinstall / full format in Win8 is quite amazing. What wasn't amazing was NVidia gfx update being a pain in the ass with shadowplay or wtf its called but I got that sorted too.

What is interesting is on my other mobo it said I had up to 9.2GB of RAM spare and now it says 9.8GB :/

The one thing I really hate is overclocking seems to be on by default. Asus has some nice OC features but I wish there was a way to simply opt out like literally and on / off option as it makes very little difference to me. CPU barely moves past 5% and even rendering massive scenes in Blender it doesn't even go past 40%, I cant really see any benefit for me to OC but it somewhat sneakily has it on by default

Anyway thanks for the replies