Will Upgrading my RAM Provide Noticeable Performance Improvement?

[jecann]

My PC is:
http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c02679437/

I recently upgraded the video card to a RX480 and the Power Supply to EVGA 600. I also installed an SSD for my OS and moved my existing HDD to secondary hard drive for storage and large apps.

I still have the original 8 GB Memory, should I upgrade to the allowable 16 that the HP Spec's page suggests is allowable?

If so, should I purchase (2) 8GB or (4) 4GB? What manufacturer? Is there any BIOS changes I would need to make or just plug and play?


Thanks!

 

[greens]

If you have a single 8GB stick, you should get a second 8GB stick for a minor boost in performance.

If you have two 4GB sticks, adding another two 4GB sticks will provide little to no performance gains for the money.

Basically we just want to make sure that you have two ram sticks, if you do - i see no point in upgrading.

 

[Jan_26]

If the specs can be trusted, you are running 2x4GB DDR3 1333MHz and all that board supports is 4x4GB tops. Performance would increase only if you are struggling on available RAM... which definitely is possible, since honestly, 8GB is gaming minimum these days... In that case you would see major improvement in responsiveness, reduced lag spikes. If, by some weird chance you don't saturate 8GB RAM, you won't see any performance improvement...

What operating system and version are you running (Win X 32/64 bit)?

 

[jecann]

Thanks greens and jan_26,

I have 4 sticks of 2GB each.

I'm running 64bit os.

 

[greens]

If the specs can be trusted, you are running 2x4GB DDR3 1333MHz and all that board supports is 4x4GB tops. Performance would increase only if you are struggling on available RAM... which definitely is possible, since honestly, 8GB is gaming minimum these days... In that case you would see major improvement in responsiveness, reduced lag spikes. If, by some weird chance you don't saturate 8GB RAM, you won't see any performance improvement...

What operating system and version are you running (Win X 32/64 bit)?

This is simply not true at all.

http://www.techspot.com/article/1043-8gb-vs-16gb-ram/page3.html

Find me a game worth playing that benefits from 16GB of RAM and... well i'd be impressed.
Crap optimization and other problems aside, there is no reason a game should need more than 8GB of RAM, even in the distant future.

VRAM is another story.

 

[jecann]

Thanks greens! Is vram only increased by upgrading the graphics card?

 

[greens]

Yeah VRAM is attached to the GPU.

 

[Jan_26]

If the specs can be trusted, you are running 2x4GB DDR3 1333MHz and all that board supports is 4x4GB tops. Performance would increase only if you are struggling on available RAM... which definitely is possible, since honestly, 8GB is gaming minimum these days... In that case you would see major improvement in responsiveness, reduced lag spikes. If, by some weird chance you don't saturate 8GB RAM, you won't see any performance improvement...

What operating system and version are you running (Win X 32/64 bit)?

This is simply not true at all.

http://www.techspot.com/article/1043-8gb-vs-16gb-ram/page3.html

Find me a game worth playing that benefits from 16GB of RAM and... well i'd be impressed.
Crap optimization and other problems aside, there is no reason a game should need more than 8GB of RAM, even in the distant future.

VRAM is another story.

Where to start...

Star Citizen
Lord of the Rings online
Black Desert online
Modded Skyrim
Modded Minecraft

These can deplete 8GB without a problem (though SC is in development and LOTRO shows that only in late game stages).

Other than that, most pple don't go and shut down everything except the game they want to play. Just having multiple Chrome tabs open can go in gigabytes sizes on its own.

Modern OSes use spare RAM (or portion of it) for caching, allowing faster and more responsive work. For example, I have currently used up 7,5GB RAM, another 7,7GB is used for caching and speeding things up. No game is started up. It needs just old X3: Terran Conflict to add another 1,1GB RAM to exceed that 8GB cap of yours. Albeit this system is developer system and runs two accounts simultaneously, so general audience wouldn't hit the 8GB so easily.

For others, golden rule to watch is current usage and if it starts climbing over 85%, you don't have enough.

 

[greens]

If the specs can be trusted, you are running 2x4GB DDR3 1333MHz and all that board supports is 4x4GB tops. Performance would increase only if you are struggling on available RAM... which definitely is possible, since honestly, 8GB is gaming minimum these days... In that case you would see major improvement in responsiveness, reduced lag spikes. If, by some weird chance you don't saturate 8GB RAM, you won't see any performance improvement...

What operating system and version are you running (Win X 32/64 bit)?

This is simply not true at all.

http://www.techspot.com/article/1043-8gb-vs-16gb-ram/page3.html

Find me a game worth playing that benefits from 16GB of RAM and... well i'd be impressed.
Crap optimization and other problems aside, there is no reason a game should need more than 8GB of RAM, even in the distant future.

VRAM is another story.

Where to start...

Star Citizen
Lord of the Rings online
Black Desert online
Modded Skyrim
Modded Minecraft

These can deplete 8GB without a problem (though SC is in development and LOTRO shows that only in late game stages).

Other than that, most pple don't go and shut down everything except the game they want to play. Just having multiple Chrome tabs open can go in gigabytes sizes on its own.

Modern OSes use spare RAM (or portion of it) for caching, allowing faster and more responsive work. For example, I have currently used up 7,5GB RAM, another 7,7GB is used for caching and speeding things up. No game is started up. It needs just old X3: Terran Conflict to add another 1,1GB RAM to exceed that 8GB cap of yours. Albeit this system is developer system and runs two accounts simultaneously, so general audience wouldn't hit the 8GB so easily.

For others, golden rule to watch is current usage and if it starts climbing over 85%, you don't have enough.

Wow. Open up 100 tab chrome window, it will eat all that RAM up, you're right...
But then start a game, POOF RAM is automagically unallocated to chrome and allocated to your game. Your PC is not that stupid - it allocates RAM where it is needed.

Modding a game to the point it breaks the conventions put in place by the original programmers is not exactly a use case i'd expect many to prepare for.

The others are not optimized and will run on 8GB just fine upon final release, or should.

 

[Jan_26]

If the specs can be trusted, you are running 2x4GB DDR3 1333MHz and all that board supports is 4x4GB tops. Performance would increase only if you are struggling on available RAM... which definitely is possible, since honestly, 8GB is gaming minimum these days... In that case you would see major improvement in responsiveness, reduced lag spikes. If, by some weird chance you don't saturate 8GB RAM, you won't see any performance improvement...

What operating system and version are you running (Win X 32/64 bit)?

This is simply not true at all.

http://www.techspot.com/article/1043-8gb-vs-16gb-ram/page3.html

Find me a game worth playing that benefits from 16GB of RAM and... well i'd be impressed.
Crap optimization and other problems aside, there is no reason a game should need more than 8GB of RAM, even in the distant future.

VRAM is another story.

Where to start...

Star Citizen
Lord of the Rings online
Black Desert online
Modded Skyrim
Modded Minecraft

These can deplete 8GB without a problem (though SC is in development and LOTRO shows that only in late game stages).

Other than that, most pple don't go and shut down everything except the game they want to play. Just having multiple Chrome tabs open can go in gigabytes sizes on its own.

Modern OSes use spare RAM (or portion of it) for caching, allowing faster and more responsive work. For example, I have currently used up 7,5GB RAM, another 7,7GB is used for caching and speeding things up. No game is started up. It needs just old X3: Terran Conflict to add another 1,1GB RAM to exceed that 8GB cap of yours. Albeit this system is developer system and runs two accounts simultaneously, so general audience wouldn't hit the 8GB so easily.

For others, golden rule to watch is current usage and if it starts climbing over 85%, you don't have enough.

Wow. Open up 100 tab chrome window, it will eat all that RAM up, you're right...
But then start a game, POOF RAM is automagically unallocated to chrome and allocated to your game. Your PC is not that stupid - it allocates RAM where it is needed.

Modding a game to the point it breaks the conventions put in place by the original programmers is not exactly a use case i'd expect many to prepare for.

The others are not optimized and will run on 8GB just fine upon final release, or should.

Honestly there is no reason to continue this discussion. You simple won't follow facts even if they slap you. No, system won't unallocate memory from a running process because it's allocated to the process. System cannot magically reduce memory footprint. Only thing it can do is to move parts of the process from RAM to swap file. Which is roughly two magnitudes slower than a RAM. Talk about responsive system then.

Game modding is quite usual these days, especially since those games themselves support it. I don't see anything out of ordinary on that.

And claiming 'others are not optimized' is really good excuse, I give you that, you can blame everything on that quote as there are no means to prove it right or wrong 🙂

 

[greens]

Lol, start chrome. Open a bunch of tabs, look at your ram usage.
Now start a game, look at your RAM usage. - It goes to the game.
Your PC allocates ram based on priority, it has been doing this for a VERY, VERY long time.

 

[Jan_26]

Lol, start chrome. Open a bunch of tabs, look at your ram usage.
Now start a game, look at your RAM usage. - It goes to the game.
Your PC allocates ram based on priority, it has been doing this for a VERY, VERY long time.

RTFM: https://msdn.microsoft.com/cs-cz/library/windows/desktop/aa366876(v=vs.85).aspx

 

[greens]

What kind of program uses 100% Private RAM? None of them.

Of the 908,600KB Chrome uses right now, on my desktop, more than half of it - 455,684KB is ready for another program to use.

Of the 150680KB Outlook uses, 110,144KB is ready for another program to use.

Most don't even keep that high of a ratio.

My system is currently using 3,022,780KB
Of that 1,677,404KB are ready to go for another program - more than half.

RAM is allocated as it is needed man...

 

[Jan_26]

Really doesn't look like the ratio in general would be so favourable towards Shareable memory.

You are missing the whole point here though. We are not talking about absolute minimum to run those programs, but whether increasing resource pool provides noticeable performance improvement. By forcing all those applications to release shareable RAM, you are also forcing them to reload/recalculate them later. As such, it won't come free and will have performance impact on your system and it's overall responsiveness.

RAM can be allocated only the way developers make it. And when you do optimizations, performance usually comes first and memory consumption second. Depending on what you need... Classic example is a simple merge sort (original one using tapes)... Give it more memory, it will finish much faster. Give it a little memory, it will take significantly longer.

 

[jecann]

WOW! I opened a can of worms, sorry about that.

 

[Jan_26]

WOW! I opened a can of worms, sorry about that.

Don't worry about it. That ain't that much of a can of worms, but it's quite important to get to the correct answer. It's constant fight with what people think is right, what's scenario from test environment and what's everyday use case of general PC user. For example I haven't seen much tests being done with system where an antivirus and firewall (non MS one) are installed. But almost everyone is using at least antivirus, right?... which is permanently active, including while gaming... Then you get Skype running, Hangouts (whatever) and it starts getting interesting. Add in something like bit torrent and you open that can of worms since you find out it's not that difficult to beat your HDD to 100% load with queue depth = 10... In that state you won't be able to play a video from that drive, let alone a demanding game without load lags. And in this specific case, size of your RAM will do zero difference since the bottleneck is on I/O. Although, you can increase cache size in your torrent client. And suddenly, your disk is not stressed, but you might run short of RAM.

As I said, keep a watch on your RAM usage and page faults... when RAM starts getting to 85% or more and/or hard faults start to occur frequently, you are starving on RAM capacity.