What will actually speed up my PC?

Rockbox · 24 Nov 2022 at 21:01

R5 3600, 16GB Ram, 3080, 512GB SSD, plenty of HDDs

TLDR: I want to push my PC to its limits and open as many tabs and programs as I want, without ever crashing. I thought 16gb was enough, but 32gb might remove the bottleneck. But ram might not even do what I'm hoping it does, so I want to know if upgrading my boot drive storage is better.

I have a nasty habit of having too many browser tabs open. I'm trying to get off the content treadmill and use my PC for what it was made for - gaming. However, too many tabs open, or letting it sleep and wake 3 or 4 times, causes the PC to reach a limit where Firefox crashes, or takes the whole PC with it. I don't want to upgrade my PC to browse the web better, but my timeline to upgrade is 2025, and I'm just getting fed up with predictable crashes. I know it's my fault for pushing it, but I'm just going to accept reality rather than bang my head against a wall.

I'm tempted to get a 5800x3d, or 32gb ram this Black Friday, but I want to know what the actual problem is. I know the cpu is the most expensive, for the least benefit. What determines how stable Win 10 is after 3 or 4 sleeps? I assume it's paging to the nvme ssd, which is nearly full anyway, when the ram is full. Would 32gb ram give me a rock solid experience? In 2025, I was going to get an 8tb nvme ssd, and put all my games and files on it, that are spread out across many hard drives. Should I get an 8tb sata ssd instead? Would freeing up the nvme ssd make it more stable? Or should I get a 1-2tb nvme ssd, where switching over would be a pain?

throwaway4372 · 24 Nov 2022 at 22:07

Start by using task manager to confirm that your 16gb ram is getting full.

Rockbox · 24 Nov 2022 at 22:10

throwaway4372 said:
Start by using task manager to confirm that your 16gb ram is getting full.

It is, but I heard unused ram is wasted ram, so browsers mainly will try to use up as much as possible, and give back when needed.

throwaway4372 · 24 Nov 2022 at 22:14

Unused ram is not wasted ram, that's bad info. Full ram is a problem. Your first step should be getting 32gb. I expect it'll be fine then and you dont need to do anything else.

AthlonXP1800 · 25 Nov 2022 at 05:20

You should get 1TB or 2TB NVMe SSD as OS and Apps drive that handle 5GB paging memory alone. It should get your PC stable after so many sleeps.

I upgraded to 16GB RAM when it was plenty enough back in 2012 but in 2018 it was not enough and I upgraded to 32GB RAM that was plenty enough to opened lots of tabs, ran apps and played game, but 4 years passed in 2022 it easily get up to 50% to 90% memory very fast when some tabs ate lots of memory like 1GB to 4GB memory wasted. I will need upgrade it to 64GB RAM soon in a few years time.

You will need either 32GB or 64GB if you want to be future proof.

Penfold101 · 25 Nov 2022 at 07:26

Is there a reason you let it sleep instead of just shutting it off and restarting?

Rockbox · 25 Nov 2022 at 07:31

AthlonXP1800 said:
You should get 1TB or 2TB NVMe SSD as OS and Apps drive that handle 5GB paging memory alone. It should get your PC stable after so many sleeps.

I upgraded to 16GB RAM when it was plenty enough back in 2012 but in 2018 it was not enough and I upgraded to 32GB RAM that was plenty enough to opened lots of tabs, ran apps and played game, but 4 years passed in 2022 it easily get up to 50% to 90% memory very fast when some tabs ate lots of memory like 1GB to 4GB memory wasted. I will need upgrade it to 64GB RAM soon in a few years time.

You will need either 32GB or 64GB if you want to be future proof.

You see, I thought the page file and ssd space might be an issue. I wanted to ask if ram was enough.

Rockbox · 25 Nov 2022 at 07:32

Penfold101 said:
Is there a reason you let it sleep instead of just shutting it off and restarting?

Sometimes it's faster to get back to stuff. Like a half-finished video.

Orcvader · 25 Nov 2022 at 10:39

Have you considered using Auto Tab Discard? You can set it to unload tabs after a certain time, and when you go back to the inactive tab it'll reactivate with everything intact. You can whitelist certain sites like video sites if unloading it causes issues with it.

Rockbox · 25 Nov 2022 at 12:05

Orcvader said:
Have you considered using Auto Tab Discard? You can set it to unload tabs after a certain time, and when you go back to the inactive tab it'll reactivate with everything intact. You can whitelist certain sites like video sites if unloading it causes issues with it.

Doesn't Firefox do that automatically?

Orcvader · 25 Nov 2022 at 12:13

Rockbox said:
Doesn't Firefox do that automatically?

It does but only on low memory. This add-on is a bit more aggressive and you can set it to unload a tab after a few minutes, so should help free up RAM more often. Sounds more ideal for your use case.

Rockbox · 25 Nov 2022 at 12:21

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

mrk · 28 Nov 2022 at 11:19

The extra RAM will offload the reliance on paging to disk if you're currently using up that 16GB. Leave the pagefile system managed and increase OS drive space too. Going from SATA to NVMe is nice, but you won't notice the difference day in day out just dossing around Windows, browsing the web etc as a SATA 6Gbps drive is perfectly fast enough for that. You will notice transfer speeds increase though with NVMe as you're going from around 550MB/s write to at least 3500MB/s (gen3) or more depending on your mobo support and new NVMe specs.

The number 1 component that dictates OS performance is RAM in my opinion. Time and time again the RAM is either set up incorrectly in the BIOS leading to instability or the default values in the BIOS are not suitable for stable operation with the current build.

You can confirm that RAM is fully stable with current settings by using a RAM testing tool like Karhu - If it can run a default test to say 4000% then you can confidently say your RAM is set up just right and then go from there. If you upgrade to more RAM then you may need to tweak settings if stability is affected, which can happen simply by adding more RAM or changing RAM as parameters will be different and not all RAM is stable without tweaking.

Your CPU is fine for now tbh, 6 cores so plenty for this sort of use, but a better CPU will handle OS and general multitasking better and you will notice the difference as things feel snappier/load faster etc.

Rockbox · 28 Nov 2022 at 18:46

^Thanks. I suspect it will speed up the system. The auto tab cacher was a big help, but it made Firefox crash more gracefully. I'd be surprised if the ram isn't seated, given how long I've had it. And I'm only running xmp. No matter what I tried, the speed and timings wouldn't budge.

I think I'll hold out for this gen, but next gen is definitely 32gb minimum on the ram. Maybe a cheap 7800x3d and 1-2tb on the os drive.

AthlonXP1800 · 28 Nov 2022 at 21:41

Rockbox said:
^Thanks. I suspect it will speed up the system. The auto tab cacher was a big help, but it made Firefox crash more gracefully. I'd be surprised if the ram isn't seated, given how long I've had it. And I'm only running xmp. No matter what I tried, the speed and timings wouldn't budge.

I think I'll hold out for this gen, but next gen is definitely 32gb minimum on the ram. Maybe a cheap 7800x3d and 1-2tb on the os drive.

My 32GB RAM is running on XMP at 3200MHz.

I dont think you will need 7800X3D. Your current Ryzen 5 3600 CPU has similar browser performance as 10600K which has same performance as my 8700K in reviews.

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You have about 11 hours left before Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales closed, clock is tick to grab 1-2TB with around 7GB read and write can be grab for as little as £130-£185.