Upgrading to 12gb RAM worth while?

[skewball]

Hi
One of my friends son's has a 3 year old PCS desktop. I can't show the exact specs but it was an AMD 2600 (edit, I initially said I7, it wasnt), 8gb RAM 1060.
I think he is struggling a little due to RAM, and I happen to have a spare 4gb RAM stick that matches the speed. (2100 as far as I recall). He has 4 slots, 2 being used.
What would happen If I slotted in my 4gb stick to make 3x 4gb for him....... I have looked it up but not really found a definitive answer as to whether there is any chance of it negatively effecting performance..? Obviously the new one will not be in a pair but will it 'definitely' improve overall performance... I can't see why not??

cheers

 

[SpyderTracks]

Hi
One of my friends son's has a 3 year old PCS desktop. I can't show the exact specs but it was an AMD 2600 (edit, I initially said I7, it wasnt), 8gb RAM 1060.
I think he is struggling a little due to RAM, and I happen to have a spare 4gb RAM stick that matches the speed. (2100 as far as I recall). He has 4 slots, 2 being used.
What would happen If I slotted in my 4gb stick to make 3x 4gb for him....... I have looked it up but not really found a definitive answer as to whether there is any chance of it negatively effecting performance..? Obviously the new one will not be in a pair but will it 'definitely' improve overall performance... I can't see why not??

cheers

It all depends what it's used for? If it's just normal desktop or office usage, then 8Gb would be absolutely fine.

But the owner of the system would need to post, it's not something we can advise through the grapevine.

 

[skewball]

I am quite sure the principle of going higher than 8gb is worthwhile for his use, I have gone through a few tests with them (gaming PC)

the query is about the principle of going with 3 sticks of 4gb, an unusual arrangement. But I will continue to research elsewhere once I find out the motherboard.

 

[ubuysa]

I am quite sure the principle of going higher than 8gb is worthwhile for his use, I have gone through a few tests with them (gaming PC)

the query is about the principle of going with 3 sticks of 4gb, an unusual arrangement. But I will continue to research elsewhere once I find out the motherboard.

What tests? How do you know he's short of RAM?

 

[skewball]

What tests? How do you know he's short of RAM?

He is coming up against RAM being fully utilised in COD mainly I think, he says it's laggy and he managed to get rid of most of it dropping settings - but more than he should have to.

Personally I think he is doing too much (discord and probably more things open etc) in the background. The more interesting question is whether there is an issue with the current RAM (leakage etc) but sadly remotely there is only so much can be done.
Anyway , what I can do easily at the moment to stop him pestering me is give him some spare RAM I have to see if it works. I'm going to try that as I can't see any logical reason why it won't help, unless it's something else. This is all not really relevent on this forum , so I'll report back. I was just interested if anyone had tried this odd combination.

 

[ubuysa]

He is coming up against RAM being fully utilised in COD mainly I think, he says it's laggy and he managed to get rid of most of it dropping settings - but more than he should have to.

Personally I think he is doing too much (discord and probably more things open etc) in the background. The more interesting question is whether there is an issue with the current RAM (leakage etc) but sadly remotely there is only so much can be done.
Anyway , what I can do easily at the moment to stop him pestering me is give him some spare RAM I have to see if it works. I'm going to try that as I can't see any logical reason why it won't help, unless it's something else. This is all not really relevent on this forum , so I'll report back. I was just interested if anyone had tried this odd combination.

When he thinks he's out of RAM, open Task Manager, click the Performance tab, then the Memory icon. Post a screenshot of that display.

To be certain whether RAM is the issue, open the Resource Monitor and in the header of the Disk section monitor the Hard Page Faults/sec value. If it's consistently non-zero (and especially if it's consistently more than about 10) then you are short of RAM - otherwise you're not.

If the 4GB RAM stick does not share the same voltages, latency and timings as the existing RAM, it may make performance worse, or even not work at all.

 

[skewball]

When he thinks he's out of RAM, open Task Manager, click the Performance tab, then the Memory icon. Post a screenshot of that display.

To be certain whether RAM is the issue, open the Resource Monitor and in the header of the Disk section monitor the Hard Page Faults/sec value. If it's consistently non-zero (and especially if it's consistently more than about 10) then you are short of RAM - otherwise you're not.

If the 4GB RAM stick does not share the same voltages, latency and timings as the existing RAM, it may make performance worse, or even not work at all.

Cool, we got as far as the first part in Task Manager the other day which is what promoted this, but not the second part with the Hard Page faults so that's sounds like a good tip cheers, thats definitely new to me so thanks 👍

Hmm, that's the sort of issue that was hinted at when I googled it but there is surprisingly little info out there.
I think I do indeed need to get to the root problem, I was hoping for a quick fix

I can see why just getting 16gb on new PCs is always advised. It feels that generally in gaming we are on the verge of going from 8gb to 16gb in most use cases, as we went from 4 to 8 a few years ago.
Cheers! Great advice on here as always 👍