Should I max out my RAM? Is it worth it or should I just stick with what I have?

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KlugeMeHappy

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Nov 10, 2013
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The fastest CPU my motherboard supports is a Phenom 9750 2.4GHz quad core but it supports 16GB of RAM.

How much RAM do I need to add to my board to stop the RAM being a bottle neck?

Is there a point at which it's not worth adding more RAM, or is it a case of the more RAM you can cram into the machine the faster it will run?
 
8GB ram is the ideal amount of RAM for gaming. But if you have more than 4GB of ram than it shouldn't be the bottleneck. And its not exactly going to run faster with more RAM. Everything has to use ram, like skype usually uses 80Mb of RAM in the background. So if you have to many background processes then your computer will start lagging out and freezing. The way you can check this is go to task manager and on the bottom of the application it will tell you your CPU usage and RAM usage. So if your RAM is usually running more than %70 of your RAM than i think you should upgrade about 4GB or something.

 
Thanks, that's brilliant, I didn't know about that. I'll take a look at it.

I'm not sure why it supports so much RAM. I bought it on eBay and it seems to be a budget/value/OEM board. It seem strange to me that it should support so much memory.

 


It really does get crazy, there are even boards that support up to 256Gb RAM. You do need a whole lot of ram for video editing and hosting servers. Cause imagine Google with one computer that supports only up to 16GB, and like hundred of thousands if not million are using there servers. See they have to have like hundreds of computers that each support up to 256GB RAM.
 
That's interesting. The one I have I'm pretty sure is definitely not a board for a server. I bought it on eBay and I'm not sure where it came from but it seems unusual to me that it would support so much memory. (http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Product/Product_Detail.aspx?DetailID=857&MenuID=20)

I guess it doesn't really matter since all I really need to figure out is whether it's worth upgrading the RAM on it. I don't do a lot of photo-manipulation or video editing so I guess I might just stick with 4 or 8 gig.
 


Yeah, Its not a server motherboard. 16GB and 32GB are normal for budget - decent motherboards. When they can support all the RAM, why not support all the RAM when its so easy to manufacture it? I mean sometimes it becomes necessary, when your running all those programs in the background. It does help a lot with multitasking to.

But believe me, its very normal. 😉

 
Thanks. :0)

I generally build these things on a budget and this is the first board I've owned (apart from the over-clocking board I just picked up on eBay) that's supported more than four gigabytes.

I've been looking at Task Manager and it seems to be varying. Last night the CPU usage was roughly almost half the memory usage (while I was surfing with multiple pages open and watching youtube) but this morning those figures have more or less reversed with the CPU at 75 to 80% while idling. I'm not sure what's going on there but I guess I just have to keep monitoring it.
 


Only 4GB? That's very small. No offense but those must be low end boards.

So this morning, the RAM was over 70% usage? Well then i would say you probably need to upgrade about 2-4GB. That should make the system run a bit faster.

And there is something hogging that CPU. My CPU usage is 3-4% while idling. So go into task manager, and look at the processes. Try to see what taking up all the CPUs resources. Also, At the top of the processes it will say what the numbers mean. Like under the CPU it will shows the usage, If you click on the "CPU" it will show the processes that are using the CPUs resources.

So under the processes you will see whats taking up the CPU. If anything is taking more than 5% of the CPU then research it and make sure it safe to have on the computer.

I had a issue with this where my CPU was at 30% while idling. So i went to task manager and found what was taking up 25% of the CPU. It was called "MsMpEng.exe". This process is a tool used by Windows Forefront Security and i believe that Windows Defender is a part of Forefront. This is what manages what comes though the network and is also a crap antivirus that uses the CPUs resources, that is installed with Windows 7. So i tried to disable Windows Defender since i had another antivirus, and the process came up in a few minutes and was using the CPU again. So i went to task manager and i right clicked the "MsMpEng.exe" and i clicked show in folder. So i did that then i renamed it. And problem was solved. But it might cause problems that i am not aware of.

Just make sure you research what is taking up your CPUs resources. Then if it is bad then delete it or rename it.



 
I know. It is really small, and it is definitely a low end mobo. I pulled it from a P.C. I bought from PC World three years ago and strategically broke two north bridge heat-sinks so that I could cram them onto the north and south bridges and over-clock the processor. It happened to support the Phenom 9950 Black Edition quad core after a bios upgrade so I picked one up on eBay and managed to O'C it to a stable 3GHz and it's still going strong.

Also, and this is pretty embarrassing, I just followed your advice and checked the processes and it turns out Folding@Home's been running in the background. I installed it to perform a stress test and than forgot I'd installed it. It's quite a relief since I thought I was running out of overhead just surfing. Thanks for posting that, I probably would have gone on thinking I was in need of an upgrade.
 


lol. That makes more since.

Glad I could help :)

And if you have any other question, just private message meh.
 
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