Advice please in installing RAM

[Ian Forsyth]

I recently updated my RAM in my Quad Core PC and see that there is a difference between Physical and available physical quantity of RAM using RAMmon program - is this an indicator that im not using all my ram because its not required or its not available for use ?

I supplemented one brick of 8 gigs RAM in Slot one and pusher 2 lots of 2 gig to slots 2 and 3 all the ram is identical as DDR3 1333 PC3 10600 ADATA

Please tell me - Is this the correct position to place these RAM sticks so that all are effective in use

[David (PassMark)]

Most motherboards support dual channel RAM. So in general it is better to have 2 or 4 sticks of RAM. 3 sticks will generally work, but there is a performance penalty of a few percent.

Yes, if you have a large amount of available physical memory, then it means you aren't using all your RAM. Although the disk cache will be making temporary use of some of the spare available RAM, until you need it.

Most people don't use more than 8GB. But you don't want to run out of RAM, as it will have a huge performance impact and / or cause system instability.