RAM is a lowest common denominator thing. EG if you have 2x8GB 3200mhz CL15 and 2x8GB 3200mhz CL17, then you will be able to run all stick as 4x8GB 3200mhz CL17 without issue unless you have some garbage tier motherboard that cant tolerate RAM. All the rigs I ran growing up had mixed ram without issue.
My first board had a 256MB 266mhz chi, two 1GB 400mhz chips, and a 512MB 333 mhz chip, running as a combined 2.75GB 266 mhz.
When OCing its usually better to have the same brand if you want to go for some insane timings. Personally I've never had issues. Even now I have two different sets of RAM running together to give me 32GB 4000mhz memory.
This is important. XMP is just RAM sticks loaded with a note that tells the motherboard what they can run at. They can run faster and they can run slower. Put in another set of sticks and you'll have to set it manually to lowest common denominator, but the slower set might be able to run as fast as the better sets XMP profile. That takes effort and testing though.
@AnOminous You can't really buy a graphics card for $100 (new) these days because the market is fucked. A stupid analogy would be that at $70 you get the shoe box, at $100 there's shoelaces in the box and at $150 they throw in the shoes. Going used is an option but the low end is still crazy, I was thinking of selling my old GTX 1050 a while back and took a look at what they sold for around here (closed auctions) and they went for 5-10% less than what I bought it for three years ago. Looking at NewEgg the 1030 sells for the same or more as the MSRP it was launched at three years ago. That's the bottom of the barrel.
Going up to 120-150 bucks, used or new, will get you quite a lot more than the hundo. It's the inverse of the high-end where a card is twice the price of another with a 20-30% difference, on the low-end there's a 20-30% price difference that gets you twice the performance.
Buy a mATX board(cheaper) with four slots for RAM, Gigabyte Aurous have some models and that's the brand I trust. 2x8GB is cheap and it can be expanded with another set, check the manufacturers website to see what they list as maximum memory, I think 64GB is relatively normal at least on AMD boards.
They also come with an NVME slot that stupid gamers use thinking it will make them game faster. SATA SSDs are fine for that, but if anyone wants an NVME M.2 drive that blows the absolute best SATA SSDs out of the water and is really, really cheap look at the Western Digital SN550. 1TB of storage, faster than any game can use, for a hundred bucks. It uses the crappier flash memory and it doesn't have a DRAM cache but that's balanced out by a fast SLC cache. It's a diamond in the rough.
