Poll of the Day > So right now I have an i3 with 4GB of RAM, do you think it would be a good boost

(+) Yeah! (+)

to upgrade to like 16 GB of RAM? Or maybe even just 8GB of RAM?
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Only if a lack of RAM is your bottleneck, which isn't very likely unless you have hundreds of tabs open constantly.
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Yes it would be pretty noticeable most likely
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4gb of ram to 8gb is a huge jump that would probably help you with a lot of things.

As long as your GPU is good. Old (multi-core) CPUs these days are pretty typically acceptable, even though I don't know what i3 you have. It depends on what gen games you're playing. 8th gen is where you need 8gb of RAM.
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8 will help. I would upgrade the CPU before spending the money on 16.

funkyfritter posted...

Only if a lack of RAM is your bottleneck, which isn't very likely unless you have hundreds of tabs open constantly.

How do you even check what's causing the bottleneck?

I don't have hundreds of tabs open, but I do notice slowdown when doing things like video editing. Or just after playing a game my PC seems to run slower until I restart it.

I also feel like I should get a new HDD.

Doctor Foxx posted...

Yes it would be pretty noticeable most likely

I figured it would after learning that RAM is actually important. I just forgot that it is an option to upgrade things like that and not just upgrade the whole PC XD

Yellow posted...

4gb of ram to 8gb is a huge jump that would probably help you with a lot of things.

As long as your GPU is good. Old (multi-core) CPUs these days are pretty typically acceptable, even though I don't know what i3 you have. It depends on what gen games you're playing. 8th gen is where you need 8gb of RAM.

My GPU is a GTX 960

My CPU is an i3-4130

SushiSquid posted...

8 will help. I would upgrade the CPU before spending the money on 16.

I was going to upgrade my whole pc, except the GPU, but I think that with my current job, I won't be doing that any time soon so I just thought maybe I could upgrade smaller parts like RAM first. my mobo only has 2 RAM slots in it. I figured if it wasn't to expensive, I could just get 2 8GB sticks.
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AllstarSniper32 posted...

My GPU is a GTX 960

My CPU is an i3-4130

With that, it's actually criminal that you don't have 8gb of RAM.
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Yellow posted...

AllstarSniper32 posted...

My GPU is a GTX 960

My CPU is an i3-4130

With that, it's actually criminal that you don't have 8gb of RAM.

I do frequent the bay of pirates so I guess it makes sense :P

I'm sold, I'll get that RAM! Then I can upgrade the PC like it's meant to, piece by piece at a time! I basically just wanted to know if it really would make that much of a difference since I don't really know how much difference more RAM makes.
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Get 64 GB of RAM

4GB is starting to be the bare minimum these days, and 8GB the standard. with 16 you will rarely if ever run out (which should be the point IMO). especially considering how cheap it is these days.

AllstarSniper32 posted...

How do you even check what's causing the bottleneck?

when you start to run out of physical memory, windows will page stuff out to virtual memory, which is written to the hard drive. generally it will be the programs that are running that you've used the least. when you tab back to a program you haven't used recently and it takes a while for it to load back, that's because it's being pulled from virtual memory back into physical memory. having more RAM prevents this from occurring as often and allows you to run more programs and keep them all in physical memory.

note that preventing this virtual memory slowdown effect is about the only thing more memory will do, though additionally of course faster RAM will be better than slower RAM. also, I'm not sure of the benefits of having your pagefile on an SSD; it's possible that virtual memory on an SSD would be way faster, though it's also supposed to be bad to write to SSD too much, so I'm not sure if that's a good idea anyway.
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Sahuagin posted...

also note that preventing this virtual memory slowdown effect is about the only thing more memory will do, though additionally of course faster RAM will be better than slower RAM. also, I'm not sure of the benefits of having your pagefile on an SSD; it's possible that virtual memory on an SSD would be way faster, though it's also supposed to be bad to write to SSD too much, so I'm not sure if that's a good idea anyway.

What I'd like to see is RAM being used as a hard drive running windows. As far as I've looked I've never seen that. It probably wouldn't even need any RAM being used as actual RAM.

The drive could flash to an SSD on power off and vice versa. That could be a neat project.
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Why is RAM so expensive? I hate shopping. What's the point in getting two 4GB sticks over just one 8GB stick? Do I really need to consider MHz and V?

I thought I was going to spend like $50 at the most on RAM....
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AllstarSniper32 posted...

Why is RAM so expensive?

it isn't? I guess it depends what you compare it to...

What's the point in getting two 4GB sticks over just one 8GB stick?

if you have dual channel memory slots, you can access two sticks faster than one stick. put a pair of sticks into the same color slots.

Do I really need to consider MHz and V?

voltage "should" be ok... theoretically you can burn out the RAM if you play with the settings in your BIOS or something. if you want to be really careful, check your motherboard specs against the RAM you're getting. it's not something I've ever paid attention to. reading about it, lower MHz might be better...? but I don't think it matters that much.

more MHz is faster but more expensive. no idea how big of a difference it can actually make.
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Yellow posted...

What I'd like to see is RAM being used as a hard drive running windows. As far as I've looked I've never seen that. It probably wouldn't even need any RAM being used as actual RAM.

The drive could flash to an SSD on power off and vice versa. That could be a neat project.

apparently a drive that contains RAM is already considered to be an SSD. (well... basing that on the unsourced sentence from wiki saying "... to distinguish it from a hardware RAM drive that uses separate hardware containing RAM, which is a type of battery-backed solid-state drive.")

doing it with a 'virtual' RAM drive (a section of motherboard memory reserved as hard drive space) is apparently possible, but tricky since you have at most 16GB to work with in windows. in linux you could have more. (oh, apparently 16GB limit only applies to windows home; windows pro can take 192GB!)

https://superuser.com/questions/985332/ramdisk-os-installing-windows-10-on-a-ramdisk
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Sahuagin posted...

it isn't? I guess it depends what you compare it to...

I compare it to....well I don't have a comparison. I just didn't think RAM would be over $50.

Sahuagin posted...

if you have dual channel memory slots, you can access two sticks faster than one stick. put a pair of sticks into the same color slots.

I'll have to look up what I actually have before buying then. I got a system scanner thingy that I think might tell me that info.

Sahuagin posted...

voltage "should" be ok... theoretically you can burn out the RAM if you play with the settings in your BIOS or something. if you want to be really careful, check your motherboard specs against the RAM you're getting. it's not something I've ever paid attention to. reading about it, lower MHz might be better...? but I don't think it matters that much.

more MHz is faster but more expensive. no idea how big of a difference it can actually make.

So basically voltage is something to look at if you're planning on doing something like overclocking? If that's the case, then I don't need to worry about it since I don't plan to ever over clock. Just doesn't interest me at this point.

edit: and i kind of just realized that I could buy the two parts I need most, RAM and a new CPU and just put them in this current PC. I don't think I technically need a new case and mobo.
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RAM bump!!!
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Why haven't you tried just downloading some more RAM yet?
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avatarmight posted...

Why haven't you tried just downloading some more RAM yet?

I did, but it made my PC go slower and weird pop up things started...popping up all over the place.
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Sahuagin posted...

if you have dual channel memory slots, you can access two sticks faster than one stick. put a pair of sticks into the same color slots.

So looking at my mobo, it in fact does have dual channel. I guess I just need to make sure it's 240 pin.

Now I just need to decide which brand I want to try to trust XD
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Right now it's basically between Kingston and Corsair.
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Ugh, I didn't think using paypal for amazon or newegg would even be an issue....
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Now I'm really annoyed....
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Now I have to wait for my Paypal card to show up....
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