Hardware Should I upgrade to 16gb of ram?

[Mama Looigi]

I currently have 8gb of ram and am comsidering upgrading to 16gb and the upgrade would be pretty cheap- about 54$. I want to know if I will benefit from it.

 

[Joe88]

Depends on what you are doing, gaming then you should go for 16GB, video/photo editing - yes, just general use then no

 

[Mama Looigi]

Depends on what you are doing, gaming then you should go for 16GB, video/photo editing - yes, just general use then no

I do use it for gaming, but do you think it could help with streaming/recording?

 

[DKB]

I do use it for gaming, but do you think it could help with streaming/recording?

Depends on what type of games your streaming. For most cases, 8GB is enough. Having 32 myself, and coming from 16gb, 16gb was extremely overkill for most things, 32gb was basically just to go into Dual Channel mode. Since a RMA fucked me.

 

[Deleted-406209]

If you play VR games you may get a small performance boost.

 

[Mama Looigi]

I’m also looking for more stability, less stuttering. Stuff like that.

 

[Ryccardo]

I’m also looking for more stability, less stuttering. Stuff like that.

That can't be answered without knowing what the actual bottleneck is for you, but typically (apart from shitty software because many programmers don't really care for efficiency anymore) the lag you feel is caused by storage access times, which is why an SSD gives a remarkable boost even to a last millennium's PC

Memory not used by programs can of course be used as disk cache (or ramdisk for temporary files)

 

[Originality]

Chances are you have a hard drive in your laptop, which if you replace with a SSD, you’ll see the biggest improvement in terms of performance, stability, and reduction of stuttering.

I find extra memory only helps when you’re doing “big” tasks, like big spreadsheets, big games, big resolution picture/resolution editing, or a bajillion tabs of Chrome. For streaming/recording, extra RAM rarely helps as the CPU is the biggest bottleneck, followed by network for streaming, or drive for recording.

 

[Mama Looigi]

Chances are you have a hard drive in your laptop, which if you replace with a SSD, you’ll see the biggest improvement in terms of performance, stability, and reduction of stuttering.

I find extra memory only helps when you’re doing “big” tasks, like big spreadsheets, big games, big resolution picture/resolution editing, or a bajillion tabs of Chrome. For streaming/recording, extra RAM rarely helps as the CPU is the biggest bottleneck, followed by network for streaming, or drive for recording.

I’m considering over locking my CPU. And as for the hard drive, do you think putting the system files in it’s own partition would speed it up for now?

 

[Originality]

I have never seen any noticeable performance gains from partitioning a drive. In theory there would be a slight advantage if the system files are first on the drive so the header doesn’t need to move so much, and the others later, however hard drives are so slow that they’ve rightly earned the nickname “spinning rust” drives.

 

[Mama Looigi]

I probably should have mentioned this before, but my disk was always at 100% usage in-game or not, but today I permanently disabled windows search and now it hovers around 5% not in game.

 

[subcon959]

If its affordable for you then I see no downside to upgrading to 16GB.