Quick performance question / speculation - Memory

[Bill1950]

Greetings,

I'm currently running an ASRockRack EP2C602-4L/D16 mb with a couple of E5-2670 processors as a general PC / workstation (very little work), W7 Ult. GTX 970, and 8 sticks of Samsung DDR3 4gb 1333mhz CL9 ECC/Reg 1.5v mem. I don't have a memory problem (at least the computer doesn't have memory issues, I might be a different problem).

I am considering upgrading to Samsung DDR3 8 x 8gb 1600mhz CL11 ECC/Reg 1.5v or 16 x 8gb of 1600mhz CL11 ECC/Reg 1.5v (same price as 8x, go figure).

HWiNFO64 tells me my mem temps don't exceed 50C now?

I don't really have a performance issue, but always looking for an improvement. Will I realize a performance improvement or am I just throwing away my money?

 

[SycoPath]

Greetings,

I'm currently running an ASRockRack EP2C602-4L/D16 mb with a couple of E5-2670 processors as a general PC / workstation (very little work), W7 Ult. GTX 970, and 8 sticks of Samsung DDR3 4gb 1333mhz CL9 ECC/Reg 1.5v mem. I don't have a memory problem (at least the computer doesn't have memory issues, I might be a different problem).

I am considering upgrading to Samsung DDR3 8 x 8gb 1600mhz CL11 ECC/Reg 1.5v or 16 x 8gb of 1600mhz CL11 ECC/Reg 1.5v (same price as 8x, go figure).

HWiNFO64 tells me my mem temps don't exceed 50C now?

I don't really have a performance issue, but always looking for an improvement. Will I realize a performance improvement or am I just throwing away my money?

Most likely no change. My general rule of thumb is you only need 16gb unless you have a specific reason you need more. Photoshop, video editing, or 3d modeling for example. I doubt you'd even notice a difference if you removed a whole processor. If your using it for gaming, I'd recommend selling the motherboard, RAM and both processors and buy a desktop single socket board and a higher clocked processor. FPS=MHz, extra cores typically aren't used, and even when they are, you're usually performance bound by the main thread, which would have completed faster on a higher clocked processor still making the extra cores pointless.

 

[T_Minus]

Going from 1000mhz to 1600 it's HIGHLY unlikely you'd even notice that.

I wouldn't waste the time on it at all.

 

[Patrick]

Going from 1000mhz to 1600 it's HIGHLY unlikely you'd even notice that.

I think the bigger benefit would be going from 32GB to 64GB or 128GB.

With general purpose applications you do not notice 300ish MHz as you would be pressed to see a 2% speedup.

 

[T_Minus]

I agree @Patrick


For general desktop use not running lots of local VMs I've been fine with 16GB until recently.
I don't keep much open, the usual stuff I like to think... firefox, chrome, dropbox, skype, evernote, pidgin, slack and maybe a couple other small apps. No problem ever with all those open and playing BF4 but when I Got BattleField 1 I started getting windows 'memory warnings'. I jumped to 12-13GB (so it said) out of my 16GB total. I ignored the error, and no problems in the game or doing anything else for that matter.

I had 24GB and 32GB a while ago and never even came close to using 12-14GB regularly but it looks like things are changing now. I mean, even chrome or FireFox can eat up tons of RAM depending on what you're doing.

Are you using or coming close to that 32GB limit? Plans to?
Like @Patrick mentioned if you are, and you need an upgrade for capacity do it for that reason

 

[Bill1950]

I don't think I've ever seen as much as 10gb used. Typical usage is a little under 6gb. But if having more than 64gb used means I can disable the pagefile, that might be worth it.

I am having some serious issues with Firefox, but that is for a different thread.

 

[T_Minus]

I have my pagefile set to 2GB max 2GB Min and have for my last 3 systems over the span of multiple years, no problems at all with 16GB, 24GB, 32GB, doing that. I even ran it disabled for 6MO+ and never noticed it.

Play around with settings and see before spending on something that likely/sounds like isn't needed

 

[SycoPath]

I have my pagefile set to 2GB max 2GB Min and have for my last 3 systems over the span of multiple years, no problems at all with 16GB, 24GB, 32GB, doing that. I even ran it disabled for 6MO+ and never noticed it.

Play around with settings and see before spending on something that likely/sounds like isn't needed

I've been using 16gb in my main system for 2 years with a 512mb-512mb page file and never seen an issue. I did play around with running the system with 32gb ram, a 4gb ramdisk, and a 3.9gb page file on the ramdisk, but I couldn't tell a difference. I ended up pulling 16gb out and putting it in another system. I do about 40% gaming on it, 40% multi-tab (chrome, 20-30tabs on average) browsing, 20% random other. 1TB NVME OS disk, GTX970, i7-4770k.