Ram upgrade, worth it?

R

RAD

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 12, 2009
Messages
489
Heya folks,
I have been having the itch to upgrade my desktop lately, (unrelated: also just popped a second gtx 285 in for SLI goodness). What my question today is: Is it worth it to go from 6 gb of ram to 24 gb of ram? As I am sure you are all aware, ram prices have dropped dramatically over the past year, so it is no longer $600 insanity to pull this off, but a much more reasonable $150 ish (or less) from places like newegg... (Link)

My mobo is a gigabyte ex58 ud4p, cpu is a i7 920 (currently running at stock, but will probably re overclock it again soon)

What kinds of performance changes would I see from making the ram upgrade? Honestly, I am trying to conceptualize it and having trouble.

I realize I could probably get a better bang for my buck as far as performance upgrades go by switching my primary hdd to a SSD, but I have been feeling pretty ambivalent and lazy about the idea of having to reformat / reinstall / patch windows and all of my programs again.
 
It's hard (not impossible) to feel a pinch with 6 gigs of ram. Depends a lot on what you're doing with your system. Is your drive swapping a lot? How does Task Manager look? If you're not currently swapping anything to disk, and if the Performance tab of Task Manager shows available ram, then you'll gain nothing from adding more memory.
I've got ~ 40 tabs open in Chrome, am running 2 linux VPCs in VMWare, Putty terminals for those PCs, uTorrent, Hulu Desktop, a couple Command Prompt windows, 5 Explorer windows, Security Essentials... and I'm only using 4 gigs out of 6 available at the moment.
 
What exactly will you be using the PC for? If it's just for gaming, not really worth it unless you tend to leave a ton of apps running in the background while gaming or running multiple MMORPG clients.

Also note that the RAM prices have actually gone up a tad in the past few months.
 
thanks for the feedback guys, sounds like I shouldn't waste the money as the return on investment would be minimal. The system is primarily used for gaming, as a media hub for the house, and some photo editing work.
 
If you're doing a ton of or high-end photo-editing, the added RAM may help.
 
IMHO, save money for a complete upgrade and seeing as how that system isn't all that dated yet, you've got time to save.
 
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