computer RAM question

realspeed

realspeed

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I would be grateful for some advice.
At present my desktop home built computer has 32GB of RAM. What difference would adding the same amount again to make it 64GB of RAM. No problem matching type for type already been in and sorced the addition parts
thank you for any replies
 
If you're using Windows, open Task Manager (ctrl+shift+esc) while using the most memory intensive applications on your computer, probably image processing and/or video editing. Click on the Performance tab and see how much memory is being used. It will probably be nowhere near the 32GB you have already. Windows will use all the memory it needs, and if it doesn't use all it has at the moment you'll gain nothing by increasing it. It won't do any harm adding more though, so if you're set on having 64GB then go ahead.
 
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High spec video card seems to be biggest way to improve things now but no doubt updating that alone is not guaranteed to make a dramatic improvement
 
realspeed said:
No problem matching type for type already been in and sorced the addition parts
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From my understanding adding RAM might still cause conflicts even if its the same make and model/ speed/ timings as there can be also different versions of chips/ PCB. It might work but there are no guarantees. I've always been advised to buy it all as a kit at the same time.
 
RyanB said:
From my understanding adding RAM might still cause conflicts even if its the same make and model/ speed/ timings as there can be also different versions of chips/ PCB. It might work but there are no guarantees. I've always been advised to buy it all as a kit at the same time.
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Admittedly I have worked mostly supporting Macs for the last thirty years rather than PCs, but that sounds like a salesman’s tale
 
Musicman said:
Admittedly I have worked mostly supporting Macs for the last thirty years rather than PCs, but that sounds like a salesman’s tale
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Could be but that is what was relayed to me on Toms hardware when I was looking to upgrade a while back. I thought it sounded crazy but it put me off adding RAM as my entire system is getting long in the tooth and could do with getting replaced in its entirety. Back in the day I mixed and matched all sorts of ram without issue providing it was the same ddr version.
 
It's definitely not a salesman's tale although whether it's a problem depends on the performance of the memory the system, at normal speeds it's not an issue but at higher speeds mixing and matching ram can be an issue particularly as even the same brand and product line can use different ram chips. When building my current system I bought four 16GB ram sticks for that reason because I wanted four as similar as possible since I'd be using XMP to run them at their rated speed beyond 2,666Mhz. Plus ram problems can be a real headache since they can cause random crashes and reboots so something simple to reduce that is worth it for me. For stock memory in a standard system as long as it matches the right type for the system I'm not fussed about mixing memory.

In terms of whether it's worth upgrading from 32GB to 64GB that depends if there's any applications on the system using serious amounts of memory. For me the only reason I went to 64GB was because I was doing a lot of virtualisation work at the time and hadn't built a dedicated ESXi server. Other than that I probably wouldn't have bothered as none of the games, image editing or video editing apps go over 32GB. As Stratman has pointed out since Vista Windows will page as much memory as it can to make use of it but will release it when other applications need it, this means the figures in task manager can seem unusually high for low activity. If you're going above 95% usage I'd check to see if the application using your ram is meant to do that and if so it may be worth upgrading.
 
realspeed said:
I would be grateful for some advice.
At present my desktop home built computer has 32GB of RAM. What difference would adding the same amount again to make it 64GB of RAM. No problem matching type for type already been in and sorced the addition parts
thank you for any replies
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What are you using your computer for? General browsing/email? Graphics work?

What processor do you have?

What graphics card do you have?

I am very tempted to just say adding an extra 32GB of RAM will make no difference but there is a chance I could be wrong hence the above questions.

As an example my system specs are:

i7 CPU
32GB RAM
3060 Nvidia GPU

I can have multiple applications open, browser, email, PS etc. and at the same time be editing/rendering videos and my computer handles this with ease using just a fraction of available RAM
 
JohnMcL7 said:
It's definitely not a salesman's tale although whether it's a problem depends on the performance of the memory the system, at normal speeds it's not an issue but at higher speeds mixing and matching ram can be an issue particularly as even the same brand and product line can use different ram chips. When building my current system I bought four 16GB ram sticks for that reason because I wanted four as similar as possible since I'd be using XMP to run them at their rated speed beyond 2,666Mhz. Plus ram problems can be a real headache since they can cause random crashes and reboots so something simple to reduce that is worth it for me. For stock memory in a standard system as long as it matches the right type for the system I'm not fussed about mixing memory.
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If you're pushing system components beyond their rated specs that makes rather more sense. Not a game I have ever got myself into much.
 
In my view it will make little difference unless your using 32gb on an older PCi Express 3 motherboard, switching to PCiE 4 or even 5, Motherboard (The latter being very expensive) will make a big difference. If you're running PCiE 4 memory on a PCiE 3 board, then it will be bottlenecked and not running to its full potential. As others have said, a good photocentric GPU, probably at least 8GB, will make the biggest difference, but again, put a PCiE 4 GPU onto a PCiE 3 motherboard and it won't perform to it's full potential. I have built 3 PC's for myself over that last 18 months, my own specifically for photo processing.
 
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If the timings are the same for all sticks then it will be fine, doesn't matter of they are Hynix/micron modules, it is the timings that it will affect the memory but to be honest would you really notice.
 
Musicman said:
If you're pushing system components beyond their rated specs that makes rather more sense. Not a game I have ever got myself into much.
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It's a bit of a strange one but it's not pushing them beyond their rated specs, it's making them run at their correct specs. In my case I have a Ryzen 3900x with an X570 chipset and ram rated at 3200Mhz but out of the box, it will only run at the rated at the maximum JEDEC standard at the time which was 2666Mhz which will badly starve the Ryzen processor of bandwidth. To resolve this, XMP needs to be enabled in the bios which will run the memory at its correct speed but it can make systems more fussy about how they run even though Ryzen systems should be running at 3000Mhz or higher. I've not upgraded any DDR5 systems so I've not looked into how their memory works.
 
JohnMcL7 said:
It's a bit of a strange one but it's not pushing them beyond their rated specs, it's making them run at their correct specs. To resolve this, XMP needs to be enabled in the bios which will run the memory at its correct speed
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Both excellent points, I wonder how many have not gone into their BIOS and enabled XMP.
 
unless you are running virtual machines etc I can't see any use for that much RAM just burning money really.
open task manager and see how much is in use with all your big guns loaded
if you have a lot of spare ram one thing you can do is turn off paging files and see if this gives you a small boost
 
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