Quick Question I have a first gen i7 with triple channel DDR. I really want to upgrade the ram as i only have 6gb. I have seen duel channel 8gb sets for around £50 or 16GB sets for around £80. I will be saving up for a new PC and donating the current on to my younger sister in the next 6 months Will i see a massive difference from 6-8gb or is it worth stumping up the extra cash and getting the 16GB. Thanks
I don't know if it's a "massive" difference, but the consensus seems to be that 16 GB is the place to be right now, but that 32GB is still overkill.
I play ark a lot and sometimes memory usage on my PC with chrome open in the background I've seen my GPU memory at 400mb off from full, and the system ram at 19gb out of 24. Since upgrading ram I've had less stutters also in gameplay The world is using more ram.
It depends what OP's intended use is. For general use (including gaming) I'd see no reason to have more than 12GB in an X58 system, especially if you're not considering a long term upgrade. I upgraded to 24GB just over a year ago because of the software that I use daily. So my recommendation is to grab a cheap 3x2GB kit or even a 2x4GB kit off ebay and use that until you upgrade your rig. There's no point spending £50 on RAM if you can pick something up for £25.
I would say its not worth spending any money on if you are upgrading in 6 months. Unless you think your sister would require the RAM.
Assuming you're not heavily overlocking, and your current memory is 1066 or 1333 DDR3 (posting a CPU-z screenshot of your mem would help), don't bother trying to find a triple channel kit, just grab 3x of these and call it a day.
I never bothered with buying triple channel kits when I was on that socket. I had various corsair xms 4gb modules different versions same clocks. Mixed and matched and had 24gb running without a problem.
Yes i was planning to running 2x8gb or 2x4gb Mostly use my PC for playing eve online and older titles. But would love to start playing new titles like Rome 2 and CIV5. I used to play Cities in motions 2 but on larger maps or sprawling cities, the game used to dump me back to windows as i didn't have enough RAM.
I run 16GB and still swap; my next build will be 32GB. I'm not gaming, though: I'm editing high-res images while having a silly number of browser tabs open alongside the occasional VM, and also dumping all my temporary files into RAM (ah, tmpfs, how I love thee.)
I upgraded from 8 to 16 and it made a big difference to the performance of some games, namely Ark Survival Evolved & Space Engineers, both of which easily use between 10-14 gig of ram depending on settings used. It is also handy when you wan't to have 2 games open at the same time. What Heresy is this I hear some say? Well say your playing a '1 life per round' style of game (like world of warships) with a group of mates and you get taken out early on in the match, you can alt tab to say CIV5/6 and play a few turns while you wait, with little performance impact to either game. Go for it!
As with everything else tech, it's all about your personal use cases. I have 16GB of RAM running @ 1866MHZ and I have no issues. That said, I only use my PC for browsing and playing games, not at the same time.