8 gigs or 16?

[catkicker]

I’m asking this here where the gamers are, if in the wrong place move or delete.

I have a old gaming rig very old!
AM3 phenom II X4 20 on a
MSI 790FX-GD70
RX580 8GB.
its going to a first computer for a young boy, it will be for school work and he wants to get in to some limited gaming.

I have 8 gigs of some GSkill
DDR31866
Would increasing it to 16 gigs help much?

 

[Tech Junky]

16gb is the bare minimum I would recommend with Windows.

Last year I upped it to 32 because stuff was crashing due to 16 not being enough for me. On Linux though 16 is still my baseline since the system only uses about 4 at any given time.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Phenom II's not going to cut it for gaming these days, it's missing support for more modern instruction sets.

(Look at refurb OEM rigs, Haswell on up.)

 

[Stg-Flame]

I can't comment on the rest of the specs, but 8GB was working just fine for me until I started playing games from 2018 era. Escape From Tarkov was the game that made me go from 8 to 16 because it was pretty much unplayable at 8, but for all the games prior (think Witcher 3 and before), 8GB was more than sufficient for my PC below.

 

[Shmee]

I think 16GB would be important in general for Windows, certainly for gaming. I would also consider dropping in an 1100T Phenom X6 if you can find one cheap. Also SSD is a must.

 

[igor_kavinski]

That build is just so unbalanced, with a powerful GPU and a really weak CPU. 16GB is definitely the bare minimum, unless the PC is going to be using a good NVMe SSD.