Question My CPU and RAM are reaching 100% while in a game, which one should I upgrade first?

[jvogs12]

As the title states, my CPU and RAM are reaching 100% while I play certain games on my PC.

I have an Intel i5-8400 CPU @ 2.80GHz

I have 16.0GB of Installed RAM

Oftentimes when they hit 100% my games will crash due to the lack of memory. This leads me to believe that upgrading RAM would be best.

I know RAM would be cheaper to upgrade. However, my birthday is coming up and I'll have extra money to spend.

Which upgrade would be better for an instant change in performance?

 

[Eximo]

More system memory certainly. Though there aren't a whole lot of games that can use 16GB of memory effectively. Or use 100% of a six core CPU. Do you have other things running?

Depending on the motherboard, you could possibly drop in a 9th gen CPU. i7-9700 or 9700k would get you 8 threads instead of the six you have now. i9-9900 would get you 8 cores and 16 threads, which would help with more recent game titles that are more multithreaded.

 

[Ralston18]

Maybe neither upgrade.

Update your post to include full system hardware specs and OS information.

Include PSU: make, model, wattage, age, condition (original, new to build, refurbished, used)?

Disk drives: make, model, capacity, how full?

= = = =

What games are you playing? Games that crash the PC versus games that do not crash the PC. Double check the game's recommended hardware specs.

Look in Reliability History and Event Viewer for error codes, warnings, and even informational events that precede or correspond with the CPU and RAM hitting 100%.

Could simply be buggy or corrupted code. Or a faltering PSU.

You can use Task Manager, Resource Monitor, and Process Explorer (Microsoft, free) to narrow down potential culprits.

Determine what all is running, what resources are being used (CPU, RAM noted), to what extent (%).

More needs to be known .

 

[sizzling]

What is your cpu and RAM usage while just at Windows desktop? It could be you have programs hogging resources.

Also what game?

 

[rickypicky5]

As the title states, my CPU and RAM are reaching 100% while I play certain games on my PC.

I have an Intel i5-8400 CPU @ 2.80GHz

I have 16.0GB of Installed RAM

Oftentimes when they hit 100% my games will crash due to the lack of memory. This leads me to believe that upgrading RAM would be best.

I know RAM would be cheaper to upgrade. However, my birthday is coming up and I'll have extra money to spend.

Which upgrade would be better for an instant change in performance?

I don't believe there are any games that will crash due to lack of memory, unless there isn't enough swap space available. Something else must be going on.

What is the make/model/age of your power supply and your graphics card?

 

[mdd1963]

High CPU usage will likely remain a simple fact of life with an i5-8400, given it's 6c/6t design limits....; however, certainly,16 GB of RAM should be enough to play anything, as long as you are not also attempting numerous other tasks/apps in the background (Twitch/Discord, streaming, watching Youtube, 12 webpages open on second monitor, etc) I'd look hard at what all background tasks/apps you have running, as you have no threads/ resources to spare when running pretty much any game these days.

Crashing, however, is abnormal/something else entirely.

I'd consider running an overnight test of Memtest86+ just to check for/rule out any ram issues. There should be no RAM errors in Memtest....ever.

In case this is just some odd glitch, one could choose to delete partitions, quick format/reinstall OS, all updates, apps, drivers and a game or two, all in well under an hour. (This would also make sure you do not have any malware that might have been hiding in the background robbing robbing you of RAM resources)