Worth a memory upgrade?

SirChumpalot · 10 Mar 2014 at 12:59

Afternoon all,

An opportunity for me to make a small memory upgrade may have presented itself. Currently I'm using 8GB (2x 4gb) of Kingston Hyper X Genesis Grey PC12800

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-094-KS

Would an upgrade to 16gb (2 x 8GB) using Kingston HyperX Blu PC12800 be beneficial at all?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-121-KS

Reasons for doing this are two-fold really. I'd like to future-proof the PC a little more for the future and the memory has presented itself at a price I might not be able to resist.

If it's not worth it in the slightest then so be it.

Thanks for the help
Dave

Admetos · 14 Mar 2014 at 01:25

It depends on your application, but typically 16GB will benefit over 8GB.

After your computer has been running it's typical workload, open up resource manager and look at remaining free memory. If 'in use' memory is almost used up, then extra memory will definitely help.

Minstadave · 14 Mar 2014 at 01:29

JasonM said:
It depends on your application, but typically 16GB will benefit over 8GB.

I'm not sure I agree with that, if you're gaming then I've yet to see over 8GB use on my system which is pretty similar to the OPs.

Thats playing most recent games.

Admetos · 14 Mar 2014 at 02:20

Thats why I told the OP to check his memory useage.

I regularly see over 16GB in use and over another 10GB in standby memory, my main computer is a software dev rig with 32gb.

David Bisset · 14 Mar 2014 at 09:40

Memory use stats can be pretty misleading as what is needed and what a program will use if it's available are very different.

I recently went from 4GB to 8GB and saw no improvement in gaming at all. Or a significant gain in anything else bar running VMs which got a substantial boost. So going to 16GB seems even less worthwhile. I'm still happy I went up to 8GB though.

Edit: I'd imagine that like me the OP is held back mostly by his graphics card. I realise that different people can have different experiences however. Were I building a new computer I'd aim for 16GB but as an upgrade I feel he'd be better selling his gfx card and using the RAM upgrade money to improve it.

Edit2: Actually I realise none of us have asked the most important question: What do you use the computer for? Will give us a better idea of what is likely to be needed.

IHxInfi · 14 Mar 2014 at 12:46

David Bisset said:
Edit2: Actually I realise none of us have asked the most important question: What do you use the computer for? Will give us a better idea of what is likely to be needed.

this...

But in reality, unless you are running virtual machines using Hyper-V or something similar 8GB is usually fine. I run 16GB in my machine simply because i wanted to fill the slots up to make them look pretty... sad I know.

There are benefits to running smaller sizes of sticks, they are usually a little bit faster in terms of CAS,RAS and CAS to RAS timings than their larger counterparts and normally a fair bit cheaper. Also if you are overclocking heavily you might want to avoid filling all the slots up as it will make the memory controller on the chip work harder and possibly more unstable at the speeds you are trying to achieve (got that last bit of info from an Asus rep providing me some assistance with my Crosshair V)

Admetos · 14 Mar 2014 at 12:46

Memory stats such commit charge are the only way to accuracy see what memory the computer requires.

If your computer that you upgraded to 8GB is one in signature with SSD. With an SSD you won't notice such as slowdown as page file will be on SSD as opposed to HDD.

8GB should be considered absolute minimum now, any spare memory will eventually be used by windows standby to cache files for faster load times.