RAM Upgrade Advice

Would I see any actual benefit if I upgraded the RAM on my PC? I'm sitting at 8GB right now on Windows 10.

Depends on what you do for a living...

This is a four-year-old gaming PC. Aside from gaming, she uses it for pretty much everything—surfing the web, streaming movies and shows, and even some light schoolwork for her web design classes where she runs a few specific apps.

Does it have an SSD? I guess adding another 8GB of RAM might help a little, but maybe not that much.

If there’s a 120GB SSD for the OS and a 1TB HDD for storage

So where's even the issue then? Is it just games?

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It’s not really a huge deal—I just have a chance to snag an identical DDR3 x4gb kit for a steal, so I was wondering if it would actually make a difference. As far as gaming goes, I know I'd probably need to pick up a beefier GPU if I wanted to run those newer titles on high or ultra settings anyway.

You probably won't even notice those 16GB of DDR3 x4gb unless she starts running Adobe Photoshop along with a few other heavy programs at once, I guess.

So, what kind of graphics card are you running these days?

Here’s my experience. I added another 8 gigs of DDR3 x4gb last week, so I’m sitting at 4x4 now, but honestly? No real difference. Except when I play Call of Duty: Black Ops 3—that game eats about 11 gigs of RAM and devours all my VRAM at 1080p.

Now I can actually crank everything up to max settings 😁

Bottom line: there's no performance boost, which makes sense if you actually understand how RAM works.

The headache only starts if you're running memory-heavy apps without enough capacity. Everything starts stuttering, the whole system drags, and it begins using the hard drive as virtual memory instead of actual RAM. That’s when things get ugly.

You can throw more RAM at a machine and nothing will change performance-wise. For example, any game that ran fine on 8 gigs is still going to run just fine with 16.

Generally, you only upgrade past 8 gigs if you're doing video editing or other heavy lifting. Apps that need a lot of "room" to breathe.

For now, 8 gigs is plenty for gaming. You might run into an occasional title that hogs more, but it's rare and usually depends on your settings. Like that COD Black Ops 3. It ran totally fine on 8 gigs if I kept textures on High instead of Ultra; I think total usage was around 7.5 gigs between the game and the OS. On Ultra, though, it jumps over 11 gigs and wipes out your VRAM.

But like I said, that's the exception, not the rule.

Larry Ortiz5 said:So, what kind of graphics card are you running these days?

I've got an NVIDIA GeForce GTX equivalent. It's nothing special—was actually pretty decent about four years ago.

Megan Ruiz13 said:Here’s my experience. I added another 8 gigs of DDR3 x4gb last week, so I’m sitting at 4x4 now, but honestly? No real difference. Except when I play Call of Duty: Black Ops 3—that game eats about 11 gigs of RAM and devours all my VRAM at 1080p.

Now I can actually crank everything up to max settings 😁

Bottom line: there's no performance boost, which makes sense if you actually understand how RAM works.

The headache only starts if you're running memory-heavy apps without enough capacity. Everything starts stuttering, the whole system drags, and it begins using the hard drive as virtual memory instead of actual RAM. That’s when things get ugly.

You can throw more RAM at a machine and nothing will change performance-wise. For example, any game that ran fine on 8 gigs is still going to run just fine with 16.

Generally, you only upgrade past 8 gigs if you're doing video editing or other heavy lifting. Apps that need a lot of "room" to breathe.

For now, 8 gigs is plenty for gaming. You might run into an occasional title that hogs more, but it's rare and usually depends on your settings. Like that COD Black Ops 3. It ran totally fine on 8 gigs if I kept textures on High instead of Ultra; I think total usage was around 7.5 gigs between the game and the OS. On Ultra, though, it jumps over 11 gigs and wipes out your VRAM.

But like I said, that's the exception, not the rule.

Got it. Thanks for breaking it down. Basically, don't waste money on extra RAM unless you really need it.

George Wood69 said:I've got an NVIDIA GeForce GTX equivalent. It's nothing special—was actually pretty decent about four years ago.

It’s a decent card. I had a 7870 once, and a friend is still using it today paired with an i5 and 8 gigs of RAM. It handles everything at 1080p—even runs Rise of the Tomb Raider on high settings. And that’s a demanding, modern title.

Yours is a bit weaker, but it should still hold its own. Besides, they basically recycled those architectures into the next generations—7870, 270X, 370x—there’s practically no difference.

George Wood69 said:Got it. Thanks for breaking it down. Basically, don't waste money on extra RAM unless you really need it.

If you have 8 gigs and aren't doing heavy lifting in Adobe Photoshop or editing video, there's no point in throwing money at more RAM. It won't speed up your PC. Everything you’ve been doing will stay exactly the same.

Thanks for all the advice. If my daughter starts getting serious about using Adobe Photoshop and stuff like that, I’ve still got time to upgrade—and hopefully, her games will run just fine even on lower settings 👍

Megan Ruiz13 said:Here’s my experience. I added another 8 gigs of DDR3 x4gb last week, so I’m sitting at 4x4 now, but honestly? No real difference. Except when I play Call of Duty: Black Ops 3—that game eats about 11 gigs of RAM and devours all my VRAM at 1080p.

Now I can actually crank everything up to max settings 😁

Bottom line: there's no performance boost, which makes sense if you actually understand how RAM works.

The headache only starts if you're running memory-heavy apps without enough capacity. Everything starts stuttering, the whole system drags, and it begins using the hard drive as virtual memory instead of actual RAM. That’s when things get ugly.

You can throw more RAM at a machine and nothing will change performance-wise. For example, any game that ran fine on 8 gigs is still going to run just fine with 16.

Generally, you only upgrade past 8 gigs if you're doing video editing or other heavy lifting. Apps that need a lot of "room" to breathe.

For now, 8 gigs is plenty for gaming. You might run into an occasional title that hogs more, but it's rare and usually depends on your settings. Like that COD Black Ops 3. It ran totally fine on 8 gigs if I kept textures on High instead of Ultra; I think total usage was around 7.5 gigs between the game and the OS. On Ultra, though, it jumps over 11 gigs and wipes out your VRAM.

But like I said, that's the exception, not the rule.

I guess it’s not even that big of a deal if you're running an SSD. Back in the day, those old spinning hard drives would absolutely kill the whole system, but now it's probably less noticeable...