Memory increase or extra ssd?

Hi All,

I'm wondering which to upgrade first, my 8gb memory to 16gb, or to buy a 2nd 250gb ssd to install games on to increase load times. As I have 4 2gb sticks atm i will need to buy 2 x 8Gb sticks, which means the memory and ssd are similar prices.

I'm mainly playing World of tanks, where my clan mates always load into maps way faster than me, and DayZ where I struggle to get high framerates and frequently get loading hangs.

So will the ssd help with these issues (i know, first world problems etc) more, or the extra memory? Or any other thoughts?

Cheers
Cam

Neither game will show gains with 16GB by the looks of things, so your probably better off with an SSD for load times.

I was wondering if the memory would help as of my 8GB I am using 5.7GB once I boot, so was wondering if I was running out of ram? Should my usage of ram be that high straight from boot in Win10?

Windows from Vista onwards uses as much RAM as it can, after all, if it's there, use it. It's far quicker than using hard disk swap files. The memory manager will allocate RAM as required. You can add more, but if it's not being actively used, it's a waste of money, so as others have said, an additional SSD will probably be a better investment.

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Originally Posted by peterb

Windows from Vista onwards uses as much RAM as it can....

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More the point, it will cache data it thinks it will need in spare RAM. So it depends on whether you're looking at the in use or the free bit of resource manager/task manager.

That said, 5.7GB sounds like a lot to me - I'd definitely be finding out which background tasks are taking up that much memory and seeing if I could trim them back. it may well be that your issue is not with memory but with one of those background processes interfering in some other way...

sysinternals process explorer is your friend. Also Windows own resource monitor is quite good.

Thanks all, nice consistent advice there :)

New SSD it is and a bit of ram usage analysis.

Cheers
Cam

5.7GB is certainly a lot. I have 32GB RAM installed and on booting into Win10 x64 I have well over 30GB available.

In any case, an SSD is easily your best bet when you already have 8GB RAM. Especially after you sort out the high memory use issue.

Get a SSD. I mean a 2nd SSD. They are great :) but again, same thing as others said, check out that 5.7GB RAM utilization right after boot. That's not right.

Well it turns out BlueStacks android emulator was starting on boot (1.2Gb), uninstalled a couple of others and now sat at 3.8/7.9 Gb memory on the performance tab of task manager.

Using Resource Monitor down to 3.6 in use, 4GB Standby and 0.5Gb free. That seems to match the behaviour of windows using all it can as a swap file.

Nothing else particularly hungry on its own in the processes list, just a lot of processes, so maybe a clean install at some stage.

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Originally Posted by camalbitboy

... Using Resource Monitor down to 3.6 in use, 4GB Standby and 0.5Gb free. That seems to match the behaviour of windows using all it can as a swap file. ....

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That's right - my work PC usually has only ~500MB of 16GB free: it's caching around 10GB of data it thinks I might need. In task manager it describes these usages as "cached", "available" and "free".

I'd always say go for RAM over HD, it's easier to ubinstall or backup stuff you don't need to use regularly, but RAM gets used everyday you use your computer.

So quick update on this thread. I bought the new SSD first which drastically helped with the load time of games on it. Both World of Tanks, and Fallout 4 are near instant now. Worth the money as it was a frequent annoyance.

I then saved for, and bought the memory. Upgraded to 16GB (2x8GB) Corsair DDR3 Vengeance Pro Series Red, PC3-19200 (2400), Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 11-13-13-31, XMP, 1.65V.

Pleasantly surprised that I saw some significant FPS increases in both 3D Mark and the Metro LL benchmark, around 50% improvement in both. Odd thing is though that 3DMark started giving me a much lower physics score, although 3DMark changed to the new version between comparisons so don't know if that was related.

Valley and Heaven benchmarks showed no significant changes. World of Tanks FPS is slightly improved 10% maybe? and Fallout around 20%.

So overall I think the memory is probably worth it just about in terms of RL experience, and getting games on an SSD ( I already had an OS SSD) is well worth it.