Question Time to upgrade to dual channel?

[Chris8282]

Hello everyone!

I just upgraded to an RTX 3070 and performance is great. However, there are several games where I do not get 99% GPU usage. I'm not sure whether it's a CPU bottleneck or a RAM bottleneck, but it seems to be worse in older games where single core performance is more important, but also, my 8700K should be doing better with them. So I am considering whether or not my single channel DDR4 2666 would benefit from another stick so that I can be dual channel. The internet is incredibly bipolar about this. YouTube videos will show 20% - 40% where there's a RAM bottleneck while some articles will have charts and graphs proving that dual channel has no benefit?

Can someone help me out? I know my setup is old, 2666 is slow by today's standards, and single channel may be more of an issue now.

Also, while I'm got you guys here, any chance it's a hard drive bottleneck? That mostly shows up as stuttering right? Because I ran a lot of the games from 2015-2019 from an external HDD with 150 - 170 MBps because 10TB externals are so cheap.

 

[Chris8282]

That's a fair point, however, my SSD is full because I was putting several large games on there to test to see if the external HDD speed was the reason for the low GPU usage. I usually have almost nothing but Windows, program files, and game saves on SSD. Nothing noticeable ha changed since then.

Either war, I've ordered the RAM and will see how it goes. Thanks everyone for the input. I'll post here the result.