RAM Upgrade

jamoor

jamoor

jamoor

Soldato
Joined
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Nottinghamshire
I have a PC with an Asus H81M Plus motherboard, it has a single stick of 8gb RAM installed, the RAM is corsair vengenace pro DDR 3 8GB 2133

I want to put in another 8gb but I cannot find another stick for sale.

What can I do, should I buy a 16gb kit? Although they are like £150 which seems like a lot.
Or can I do anything else? I use it for office work, but I do a lot of multi tasking hence the need for RAM
 
Laptops have dual channel, but work just as well with mixed ram capacities and non-identical pairs, as they only have 2 so-dimm slots.

If you need to upgrade, any 8gb DDR3 stick will do above a certain speed will do. Just check with CPU-Z and/or bios to see what speed your ram is actually running at as you might not need 2133 ddr3 ram if your computer isn't going to use that speed.
 
If its just for office work then I wouldn't worry about speed matching too much. More is better. It'll all run at the lowest speed of whatever you put in, which in reality will be negligible for office work.
 
Jamore, does this computer boot of a HDD?

If so then another alternative would be to enable Windows 10 Readyboost, for best results you need one of the faster USB 3 memory sticks. I've used readyboost on a computer with 32GB Ram and even on that computer performance monitor showed it working, so it will definitely give you some improvement on a 8GB machine.
 
JasonM said:
Jamore, does this computer boot of a HDD?

If so then another alternative would be to enable Windows 10 Readyboost, for best results you need one of the faster USB 3 memory sticks. I've used readyboost on a computer with 32GB Ram and even on that computer performance monitor showed it working, so it will definitely give you some improvement on a 8GB machine.
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Damn, I use windows 7 at work. Is there a similar feature for that?
 
mrbazmondo said:
If its just for office work then I wouldn't worry about speed matching too much. More is better. It'll all run at the lowest speed of whatever you put in, which in reality will be negligible for office work.
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I see, I think RAM is just hilariously expensive hence why I am finding it hard to justify the huge cost :/
 
jamoor said:
Damn, I use windows 7 at work. Is there a similar feature for that?
Click to expand...

Yes Readyboost works on Windows 7 also.

As mentioned you need a fast USB 3.0 memory stick, maximum size supported is 32GB. I would use a memory stick that's at least 8GB in size however.

I good stick to use would be a 'Patriot 32GB Supersonic Rage Series USB 3.0', as these are quite fast.
 
mrbazmondo said:
Are you booting off SSD or HDD? If not consider upgrading to an SSD, you'll likely find it has a bigger impact than increasing your RAM.
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My experience that's only part correct.

Since 2008 I've been using SSD's, I own 10 however I have a 50% issue rate with them.

Last month the SSD on my main development computer failed and I replaced with an Western Digital RE drive.

My main development computer has 32GB ram, firstly it's much slower loading compared to the SSD, however once the computer has been running for about 20 mins the speed difference between SSD and HDD is not really noticeable. I put most of this down to the fact I have 32GB ram and super fetch is caching, as I type this i'm seeing 13GB of standby (cache) memory I've been really surprised that Visual Studio compile times appear no different running HDD then compared to SSD, I also use Intel RST and write through cache is enabled so writes are being buffered into memory. The write through caching is probably the reason why compiling projects on the HDD feels no different to the SSD.
 
If you hit a big windows update, or your PC wants to do a virus scan, an SSD is going to be a lot more benefit than increasing from 8gb to 16gb.
I've got 32GB in my main machine too. It makes a difference if you're actually doing something that needs that much RAM. I have another machine with 12GB and an SSD, which was getting to be unusable when it only had a HDD.
I agree on compiling - I've compared HDD, SSD and RAM disks, they all compile at about the same speed.
 
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mrbazmondo said:
If you hit a big windows update,
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I do totally agree on the windows updates, there very slow with a HDD (after being use to SSD). I presume although I have write through caching enabled in Intel RST the write buffer is just becoming fully populated.

However for general operation, office tasks, visual studio compiling, SQL server, once my computer has been running for about 20mins i'm not really missing the SSD. The main thing that I notice more is the HDD noise where as the SSD was silent. Will say for those first 15-20 mins super fetch is working really hard, even without using the computer the standby memory is increasing as Windows is attempting to preempt the data I might require from the HDD.

I am also running Readyboost, and i've tested it in performance monitor and seen the cache hits as I use the computer. I have also tested my HDD's and in Crystal Disk Mark i'm seeing 4k reads much faster with the Readyboost enabled, when I disable the Readyboost 4k reads return to what would be expected for that HDD.
 
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One thing you're probably missing out on is pagefile usage sucking up time on HDD as you have so much RAM. You tend to not notice this happening on an SSD.
 
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