Should I Upgrade to 16gb of RAM

[d3th5150]

So currently I have 1x8gb Hyperx fury 2133mhz DDR4 RAM. I mostly game on my system so this much is fine, for now. But I've been wondering lately if there would be a performance gain of upgrading to double the capacity.

Now before you say "games don't use 16gb of RAM", I know this.

I'm not asking if I will benefit from added capacity, I'm asking if I will benefit from Dual channel instead of a single channel.

 

[blazorthon]

Yes, dual-channel can help, although it won't make a huge difference. It is a bigger deal if you have otherwise higher end components such as an i5 and a decent graphics card, especially SLI or Crossfire rig. It is also more helpful to have at least dual-channel memory if you are hunting for very high FPS (over 60) in some of the more intensive games. The Skylake i3s and higher-clocked Haswell i3s may be fast enough to benefit.

However, with DDR4, the memory is already a lot faster (for bandwidth, not latency, which is all that dual-channel versus singel is relevant for anyway) than it was with most systems that this has been tested with, so I doubt that it is as important as with DDR3. I can't promise that the gain would be noticeable. Are you satisfied with what performance you have right now and what are the rest of your components??

 

[InvalidError]

If you are using the IGP, having dual-channel doubles available bandwidth and would help considerably.

With a discrete GPU, the CPU performance gain from having dual-channel is typically in the low to mid single-digit % increase.