Replace RAM or add to it? Gateway DX4860

[dishan1]

Hi, I'm trying to max out my old Gateway DX4860 i7 box until I can afford a replacement. It came with 8GB, 2 sticks of Nanya brand PC3-10600 1333MHz 4GB Non-ECC DDR3.

Can I just buy another 8GB? Or should I take these out and start over with 16GB of something a little faster/better? Ultimately, if the performance of whatever I buy would be bottlenecked by what I have, I'm better off starting over I'd think, right?

 

[Nate88888]

i would recommend getting fastest RAM, possible and get a minimum of 4GB. If you have 32-bit OS get 4GB but if You have 64-bit try around 8 to 16GB.

 

[dishan1]

i would recommend getting fastest RAM, possible and get a minimum of 4GB. If you have 32-bit OS get 4GB but if You have 64-bit try around 8 to 16GB.

I'm already using 8. My question was whether or not I should add ANOTHER 8 (I'm obviously running x64) or start over with 16 that match, based on the specs of the RAM I already pasted above.

 

[william p]

8GB is enough for gaming. Over that is mostly for virtual machines where it get's split up,or something like video editing where a lot of data is moving and changing at once. Downloading movies might need more but i'm not sure since i don't do that.
Faster memory usually comes with higher latency so the speed increase is not linear. Maybe 1/2 what the speeds would suggest. Also with modern GPUs with 2GB or more of DDR5 there's not much bang for the buck. Go to Crucial.com and see what speeds are supported by your computer. But personally I wouldn't bother. You're pretty good right now. Having enough for what you're doing is much more important than speed at the level you're already at.

 

[dishan1]

8GB is enough for gaming. Over that is mostly for virtual machines where it get's split up,or something like video editing where a lot of data is moving and changing at once. Downloading movies might need more but i'm not sure since i don't do that.
Faster memory usually comes with higher latency so the speed increase is not linear. Maybe 1/2 what the speeds would suggest. Also with modern GPUs with 2GB or more of DDR5 there's not much bang for the buck. Go to Crucial.com and see what speeds are supported by your computer. But personally I wouldn't bother. You're pretty good right now. Having enough for what you're doing is much more important than speed at the level you're already at.

I appreciate the response, however my question was never whether or not I need more RAM. I'm quite certain that I do, and a quick glance at my resource monitor will confirm that. I'm not a gamer (those days are long behind me). I'm a freelance editor/animator, and although I usually work in 1080p, sometimes lately I need to work with frames closer to UHD in size.
I arrived at this upgrade scenario as an alternative to a new build, since after doing some research I found that my i7 2600 is still a pretty darned good chip for what I do, and not necessarily worth the cost to upgrade to a newer generation processor. Rather, I'm going to max out my RAM, get a faster and larger SSD (mine is a smaller 2nd gen Intel unit), and possibly a new GPU with some more CUDA cores.

My only hesitation has been whether or not adding to my current RAM was enough, or if I need to start over with all new RAM. I think

 

[william p]

There's nothing wrong with the speed of your current RAM, and RAM speed makes a minor difference in overall system speed unless you have some special application that need that. Adding RAM will be very cost effective, and there is no down side to having extra. If you add the money you save by not replacing RAM to the GPU budget you'll be way ahead.

 

[dishan1]

There's nothing wrong with the speed of your current RAM, and RAM speed makes a minor difference in overall system speed unless you have some special application that need that. Adding RAM will be very cost effective, and there is no down side to having extra. If you add the money you save by not replacing RAM to the GPU budget you'll be way ahead.

Since I don't use my PC for any sort of gaming whatsoever, the GPU only gets used for CUDA acceleration in encoding processes. Since I work with media and content creation, RAM is one of the most valuable components in my setup (seconded perhaps by CPU speed / cores). I often have more than one NLE open at a time so that I can drag and drop between them. As you can imagine, my computer slows to a crawl during this, with lots of page swapping going on in the background. This is why I wanted to max out my RAM, I wasn't asking if it was a good idea or not (I already know it is!), I was looking for advice as to the best way to do it. Thanks though!

 

[william p]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ram-speed-tests,1807.html
This is an old test of various RAM speeds and what they produce in results. If you run out of RAM it gets very slow. If you buy faster RAM it's worth a few percent. If CUDA cores help what you're doing I think tha's where I would spend the extra money.