Which Memory Config?

[Razaryel]

Hello, I'm wondering if I should use 16gb or 32gb RAM in my current setup. i7 6700k stock 4ghz, Asus Z170 Pro Gaming, GTX 970 (GTX 980Ti once it arrived in mail) Samsung 850 EVO SSD 500GB, 1TB HD, 1000 Watt Corsair PSU, 16 (now 32) GB 3000MHz Corsair Vengeance RAM. I bought another 16gb because it was so cheap and figured it would help me future proof my PC. It's not uncommon in black ops 3 that I see task manager memory usage of around 10.5gb. So I bit the bullet and got another 16gb DDR4 3000MHz Corsair. My question is, will I see an overall performance increase or decrease? I realize most games won't use anywhere close to 16GB and with 6GB VRAM on my future GPU am I losing performance by getting more RAM? Thanks.

 

[HowNowBrownCow]

RAM bundled together in the same kit has been tested to run together at the rated speeds. When you buy RAM from multiple kits, even if they are identical kits, the ram will often not perform as well together. It is possible that your motherboard will derate the RAM from 3000 MHz to something like 1600 MHz (assuming you enabled XMP in your BIOS anyway to get the Corsair Vengeance RAM up to the 3000 MHz advertised speed). It is even possible that the two sets of RAM will not be stable together at all. If you already purchased the RAM, try it out. If you never enabled the XMP RAM settings in your BIOS, then it's possible the two sets will just run together at that speed. If you purchased identical kits, you can try and enable the XMP and see if they happen to work together at higher speeds. If not, you can decide if you want 16 GB of high speed RAM or 32 GB of low speed RAM.

To answer your question of if 32 GB will make your system run faster than 16 GB in general ... probably not. If you are doing a lot of video editing, or running RAM disks, or running multiple Virtual Machines, you would benefit from the larger amount of RAM. Otherwise, 16 should cut it. Especially if you haven't purchased the RAM yet and you haven't enabled XMP, you're better off just getting the RAM you have to run at a much higher speed than it runs by default.
You will get a small performance bump running your RAM at 3000MHz - not too much but a few FPS on your games. If you add 16 GB more ram, you probably won't notice at all, unless you something that is extremely memory intensive.