RAM upgrade on a DDR3 machine

[philehidiot]

Well, I just thought I'd share this.

I was getting severe lag during gaming which felt a lot like the days of yore with page file swappage going on... looked at my RAM use. I found I was using 10.9GB of 12GB with a fair bit of compression going on.

My machine is a 4690K (I think) which is on an Asus Z-97A which had 12GB of DDR3 @ 1600, 9-9-9-27. There is water-cooling on the CPU and the GPU is a Vega 64.

So, for two reasons I bought more RAM:
1) It was only £80ish for 16GB which is actually affordable
2) The future mother in law has 16GB and I can't have her PC spec be higher. It was not a tenable situation. Dignity was at stake.

I've only had chance to do do the standard memory testing and haven't had chance to games test yet but I want to know...

Do people think I'm stupid upgrading to 24GB something running on DDR3? Should I have saved the money, put it towards a Ryzen CPU, mobo, likely a new AIO water cooler and at least 16GB of DDR4 RAM?

It's done now and the cost of a Ryzen rebuild would have been around £600 last time I looked. Plus my CPU isn't overclocked as it's all held in reserve for when the system becomes CPU limited (no point in pushing a chip before you need to do so). I have noticed no signs of CPU bottlenecking.

Be brutal, people. If my judgement is off I wanna know about it.

[kalniel]

The only judgement as far as e-peen is concerned is more is better.

In terms of rational arguments: Whether it's DDR3 or not is irrelevant - if you need the RAM then you need it. I'm slightly puzzled that you need it, but hey ho.

In terms of saving the money.. nah - a 4690 isn't going to be limiting any time soon. When it is, change it, and then you'll get even more for your money.

[DanceswithUnix]

Costs for Ryzen are possibly a bit off. My upgrade was under £500 for a 2600X on an OK Asus motherboard with 16GB of 3200MHz DDR4.

But in your situation I would probably have still bought the ram. I was finding that playing Elite in VR my Fx8350 was hitting 100% on all cores and almost unplayable and I'm not going back to a flat screen. This strikes me as a bad time to spend big on Ryzen with 3000 series so close to release, unless like me you have hit a wall and found the machine unusable.

[MrJim]

Regarding overclocking: you don't mention whether you're running Windows or not, but if you set the power profile to the power-saving mode, Windows can run the CPU at a lower clockspeed when you're on the desktop, but ramp up the speed when you need it, such as when you're gaming. I have a 3570K which runs at between 1.6Ghz and 2.5Ghz on the desktop, but goes up to 4.5Ghz in games or other cpu intensive tasks. You get the 'best of both worlds'.

As far as amount of RAM is concerned, I know some games with actually allocate as much RAM as they can get, whether or not it actually uses it, so you might not be using as much as you think. Still, if you find a good deal on some RAM, there's no harm in having lots of it At least prices are on there way down, which is a relief to everyone.

[Marcvs]

There are some apps (looking at you Substance Painter) that eat 100+GB of ram >

[Disturbedguy]

Well, I just thought I'd share this.

I was getting severe lag during gaming which felt a lot like the days of yore with page file swappage going on... looked at my RAM use. I found I was using 10.9GB of 12GB with a fair bit of compression going on.

My machine is a 4690K (I think) which is on an Asus Z-97A which had 12GB of DDR3 @ 1600, 9-9-9-27. There is water-cooling on the CPU and the GPU is a Vega 64.

So, for two reasons I bought more RAM:
1) It was only £80ish for 16GB which is actually affordable
2) The future mother in law has 16GB and I can't have her PC spec be higher. It was not a tenable situation. Dignity was at stake.

I've only had chance to do do the standard memory testing and haven't had chance to games test yet but I want to know...

Do people think I'm stupid upgrading to 24GB something running on DDR3? Should I have saved the money, put it towards a Ryzen CPU, mobo, likely a new AIO water cooler and at least 16GB of DDR4 RAM?

It's done now and the cost of a Ryzen rebuild would have been around £600 last time I looked. Plus my CPU isn't overclocked as it's all held in reserve for when the system becomes CPU limited (no point in pushing a chip before you need to do so). I have noticed no signs of CPU bottlenecking.

Be brutal, people. If my judgement is off I wanna know about it.

Not stupid at all. I have an old rig that's got 16GB, I've recently re-purposed the machine to use as a serving and play with VM's, so im considering upping the RAM to 32GB..

[philehidiot]

Thanks all for the input. Makes me happier I made the right decision but it's so easy to ask people's opinion and get a "more is bettererer!" when it's not their money.

With you lot I can guarantee will tell me if you think I'm wrong. And why.

The £600ish estimate was several months ago before the RAM price drop. I expect you're right and it might well be a couple of hundred quid cheaper, especially as my requirement for a PCI slot limits my mobo choices.

[spacein_vader]

Part of the reason I'm still on a Haswell i5 is that moving to something newer would involve paying well into 3 figures for the same amount of memory {16gb) I already have.

The other reason is that it's yet to stumble with anything I've thrown at it.

[philehidiot]

Part of the reason I'm still on a Haswell i5 is that moving to something newer would involve paying well into 3 figures for the same amount of memory {16gb) I already have.

The other reason is that it's yet to stumble with anything I've thrown at it.

This is my argument. Plus my liquid cooling on the CPU is there for a reason and will hopefully give me more chooch when I do start struggling.

Want to argue I could have spent the not inconsiderable sum of money used for the liquid cooling on a better CPU which would also have lasted longer? I'll agree, really. In retrospect I never had issues with a decent air cooler and also could have overclocked that CPU further. The only difference is you get to a certain age and there will be feature sets you need missing. I had HDCP issues with my old monitor as it was getting to old, for example.

[Zak33]

Question : have you noticed that since adding DDR3 ram, you have lost Hard Drive spare space?

Do you still have the Windows 10 Pagefile (virtual ram) active?
I found that the Pagefile (a kinda virtual ram extension on the hard drive) seems to equal the ram size, which is totalyl upside down because really you need less not more!

in adding new RAM you will prolly find that your Windows Operating system spare space has dropped by the same amount (mine did)

So you can set it to a max limit or even turn it off.

[DanceswithUnix]

I found that the Pagefile (a kinda virtual ram extension on the hard drive) seems to equal the ram size, which is totalyl upside down because really you need less not more!

Historically Windows NT used the BSD Unix memory allocation method where all allocations must be backed by physical storage, where the last part in the chain is the swap file and the ram is more of a swap cache. It makes for a more stable system where it is harder to get out of memory errors crashing programs, but it does demand more disk space set aside, and I think there are still some hangovers from those old days.

[ik9000]

Question : have you noticed that since adding DDR3 ram, you have lost Hard Drive spare space?

Do you still have the Windows 10 Pagefile (virtual ram) active?
I found that the Pagefile (a kinda virtual ram extension on the hard drive) seems to equal the ram size, which is totalyl upside down because really you need less not more!

in adding new RAM you will prolly find that your Windows Operating system spare space has dropped by the same amount (mine did)

So you can set it to a max limit or even turn it off.

I always thought that was so the sleep and hibernate functions played nicely? Have I misunderstood?

[DanceswithUnix]

I always thought that was so the sleep and hibernate functions played nicely? Have I misunderstood?

No, you are quite right but not being much of a laptop user I tend to forget about suspending to disk

[scaryjim]

Hibernation has its own file (hiberfil.sys, iirc) - not sure about suspending to disk though ...

Anyway OP, I'm currently thinking about spending money on memory adapters so I can stick a load of old DRR3 laptop SODIMMs into an old computer to give it a new lease of life. As long as the underlying platform still meets your needs, there's absolutely no reason not to invest in upgrade that will improve performance

[cptwhite_uk]

My only thoughts are that you overpaid on the RAM, you can get individual 8Gb sticks from CEX, with 2 year warranty for £25 each:

https://uk.webuy.com/product-detail?...240-pin-memory

[philehidiot]

My only thoughts are that you overpaid on the RAM, you can get individual 8Gb sticks from CEX, with 2 year warranty for £25 each:

https://uk.webuy.com/product-detail?...240-pin-memory

What about matched pairs? Surely if you use individual sticks you can't run dual channel? Or am I totally wrong there? Also the pics suggest the latencies on that RAM are quite a bit higher than what I bought. I'm also running these over-voltage in order to ensure my older RAM can run at XMP settings so having something designed for overclocking may be more sensible. Or I may have been conned by marketing and a HUGE heat spreader (totally pointless but does make installation easier).

Also, maybe I'm old school but I'm from the days where you could absolutely get bad RAM. Cheapo RAM was a game of Russain Roulette and to be avoided. That being said, maybe looking at CEX would have been sensible for a second hand, fully tested and warrantied kit.

As for drive space question - I'm afraid I honestly didn't pay any attention to how much space was left pre and post..... Now I've looked, it is VERY possible it has dropped as I now have 61GB free on my main drive which is getting into "do I need another drive shortly" territory. A thought which hasn't occurred before and therefore suggests free space was higher.