Differences between 4 and 8GB of RAM

Porcelina

Porcelina

Porcelina

Associate
Joined
2 Aug 2010
Posts
251
Location
Sheffield
First off, my specs are as follows:

Intel i5 760 2.80GHz (stock speed)
G.Skill Ripjaw 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C8 1600MHz
Sapphire ATI Radeon 5850 (stock speed)
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB
BenQ 24’’
Windows 7 64-bit

I was wondering if I will see much if any performance increase if I were to double up on my RAM? The setup is purely for gaming. I assume that most games will only access 4GB of RAM, which is fine, but would not adding another 2x2 of the same make actually help the computer perform by letting the superfluous RAM as it were handle any background processes? I like to game while having both Firefox or Google Chrome and Windows Media Player or a different media player running in the background. I am not dissatisfied with my computer performance by any stretch, and I know that either overclocking the CPU or the GPU will increase the performance much more, but I am not willing to void any warranties. I am merely looking for a way to squeeze a little more out of the rig for under a hundred pounds.

I am not really looking for an analysis of whether it is worth it or not, I am more interested in an objective view on whether there is anything to gain from doing this and what kind of dividends one might be looking at.

Additionally, seeing that Windows 7 64-bit is set up to recognise a lot more RAM than any other Windows OS, is it fair to assume that going up to eight GB RAM would increase the system performance as such, or will I find that other components will bottleneck the computer way before I can expect to see a difference between the two memory quantities?
 
Keep task manager open and see how much of your RAM gets utilised at present. That will answer your question. I expect the answer will be "no" though.
 
Yup, look at task manager and see if you're coming close to 4gb used. I rarely do, even with large Photoshop documents open.
 
As an afterthought, a £100 spend on an SSD might make your PC feel noticeable faster, although it probably won't affect your FPS.
 
Overclocking doesnt void the warranty :eek:

Even if it does if it breaks how are they going to find out that you overclocked it when its broken?
 
mattjd said:
Overclocking doesnt void the warranty :eek:

Even if it does if it breaks how are they going to find out that you overclocked it when its broken?
Click to expand...

Yes, I realise that no one will ever know. However, I do believe that it technically voids the warranty? Or am I just dreaming this up, possibly listening to people who have no idea what they are talking about?

Also the SSD idea is probably the better option, cheers for that, it had slipped my mind for some reason.
 
For gaming, you will barely notice a difference between 4gb and 8gb.

So far most games don't go use over 3gb of RAM.

Only game I can think of that would benifit is Metro2033 and that's like one out of thousands.

Edit: I'd suggest slightly overclocking (20% or so) your cpu to see if it makes a difference.
 
It won't void your warrenty, as they have no way of finding out. Overclocking will definetly give you higher FPS. But make sure you have a nice 3rd party CPU cooler.
 
i was tempted to go 6-8gb in the future but it doesnt sound like it will make much diff for my games. nice thread cheers
 
Have a Gelid - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HS-001-GD&tool=3 - given as a recommendation from both OcUKers and others with a lot more knowledge than me. Should imagine it can handle some overclocking on the cpu, but that is more a hunch than anything else, I have no clue about the efficiency of cpu coolers when it comes to overclocking in general.

Cheers for the help.
 
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