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I heard from our vendor that it is okay to put Low Voltage ram with regular voltage RAM. They said all that would happen is that the LV RAM would ramp up to match the 1.5v ram (in other words, the ram won't run at LV).

Can anyone confirm from experience if this is the case? From my experience mixing any factors in RAM is not the best idea, but curious about experience around this particular issue.

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  • There are probably too many type of RAM called LV to be sure which type is talked about - I see disaster ahead if somebody later reads that question and is mistaken about what kind of RAM called LV in 2015 is discussed :)
    – rackandboneman
    Jun 12, 2012 at 18:15
  • Well it could not work if its gonna get too hot. If you have good cooling it should work just fine, but run the test for a day then like memtest to make sure its all fine.
    – Andrew Smith
    Jun 16, 2012 at 14:26

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For the Dell R610s we're upgrading specifically, it is supported as indicated by the R610 technical guide:

With the introduction of the Intel ® Xeon ® processor 5600 series, low voltage (LV) DIMMs have been added for selected memory configurations for the PowerEdge R610. Only this processor series supports operating DIMMs at the lower voltage (1.35V, also referred to as DDR3L). The Intel Xeon 5500 processor series does not support low voltage operation. However, due to the backwards compatible nature of low voltage DIMMs, they can be operated at 1.5V. Therefore, DDR3L DIMMs can be used in systems with either processor series, and the platform will automatically choose the appropriate operating voltage based on the processor populated. DDR3L DIMMs will be qualified and available for use with Intel Xeon 5500 processor series mid-year 2011.

Also, we've confirmed this by just installing such LV DIMMs in our web tier along-side non-LV DIMMs and all is well.

This may vary by server, but the way this is worded in several technical guides, it appears to be universally true that LV DIMMs will work at a normal 1.5V level.

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Be attentive - it's equipment dependent. For example Supermicro X8DTL-i (BIOS 2.1b) + Intel Xeon W5580 has no backward compatibility with some 1.35v RDIMM (only 1 or 2 RDIMMs instead of 3 are detected by system).

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