Confirm if my desktop has a RAM issue?

[jana519]

Last week I bought a Dell Optiplex prebuilt with i5-3470 and 4GB RAM. I added a GTX 1050 and I am using it to play The Witcher 3. It runs the game beautifully. The problem is there is so much game content I don't know about, so I'm using Google Chrome while playing to search for info on skills/quests. I have about 6-8 Chrome tabs open, and when I Alt-Tab to Chrome it is slooooow (takes about 1 minute to fully load into Chrome). I suspect the problem is I need a bit more RAM and that will make the multi-purpose smoother. Or am I wrong in my diagnosis? Anyone confirm or correct? Thanks in advance!

 

[dave_the_nerd]

You are probably right.

You can find out for sure if you open the Resource Monitor and check out the Memory tab. While you're having a slowdown, look at the "hard faults per second" graph. Chances are better than average that either chrome.exe or witcher3 is going to be posting a bunch. (If you have enough ram, you should never see this number get higher than, like, 2 total.)

If you are having hard faults (which means the application is having to go back and read data from the hard drive that really ought to be in RAM) then you'll need to upgrade RAM. I'd recommend 16GB, but 8 is probably enough.

 

[jana519]

Hmm, well if the RAM is my issue, seems like this would be a good way to confirm it. I'll give that a try, see what happens.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Good luck.

Oh, and if you haven't already, get an SSD, finances permitting. Seriously.

 

[Thebobo]

Last week I bought a Dell Optiplex prebuilt with i5-3470 and 4GB RAM. I added a GTX 1050 and I am using it to play The Witcher 3. It runs the game beautifully. The problem is there is so much game content I don't know about, so I'm using Google Chrome while playing to search for info on skills/quests. I have about 6-8 Chrome tabs open, and when I Alt-Tab to Chrome it is slooooow (takes about 1 minute to fully load into Chrome). I suspect the problem is I need a bit more RAM and that will make the multi-purpose smoother. Or am I wrong in my diagnosis? Anyone confirm or correct? Thanks in advance!

Get off Ebay from auditmacstech by chance?

 

[jana519]

I've already got 165 in my desktop and the wallet is tight enough, I'd rather spend $0 on it TBH. It runs TW3 beautifully, I can get 45 FPS average (not peak) on Ultra settings. Yeah the SSD would cut loading times I suppose but I can't stand the prices for SSDs. I'm cheap as hell.

As it stands I can probably pick up 2GB more DDR3 RAM for $5. That's a 50% upgrade, nothing to scoff about.

 

[jana519]

Get off Ebay from auditmacstech by chance?

Nope. Craigslist for $75. It's the Optiplex 3010 MT. SB Optiplexes are all kinds of cheap these days, but I suppose getting an IB Optiplex at that price was a stroke of luck on my part. Oh well win some, lose some.

 

[Ranulf]

Minimum specs for Witcher3 is 6GB of ram FYI. I'd go 8GB minimum.

 

[Raduque]

Chrome is a super ram hog. IMO, Edge is much better at ram usage.

4gb is IMO, barely enough for The Witcher 3 by itself. I'd up to 8gb as the minimum or all the way to 16 to be comfortable.

 

[jana519]

Here are the results of running Resource Monitor:

Clearly I am maxing out my 4GB of RAM with my system and getting memory hard faults. But here is the rub: when I ran Resource Monitor to do the tests, I had no issues switching between Chrome and TW3. It wasn't silky smooth mind you, but there was only a minor lag and then it ran fine. The problem appears to be when I have Chrome open, play TW3 for an hour or longer, then try to Alt-Tab back into my Chrome Window. So my question is why I can Alt-Tab between TW3 and Chrome normally, but if Chrome is inactive for a time it takes so long to start up? Any one can put a finger on if this is hardware or software related? Obviously upgrading RAM will greatly help the system smoothness overall but it appears not to be the core problem.

 

[Elixer]

It wasn't silky smooth mind you, but there was only a minor lag and then it ran fine. The problem appears to be when I have Chrome open, play TW3 for an hour or longer, then try to Alt-Tab back into my Chrome Window. So my question is why I can Alt-Tab between TW3 and Chrome normally, but if Chrome is inactive for a time it takes so long to start up? Any one can put a finger on if this is hardware or software related? Obviously upgrading RAM will greatly help the system smoothness overall but it appears not to be the core problem.

It is because you are running low on RAM, and Windows paged out Chrome to HD... so when you need Chrome again, it has to get the data from HD, not RAM...

 

[whm1974]

Yes upgrade your ram and get a SSD. Both will increase your performance greatly.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

But RAM first. 2GB for $5 is a good deal, but I only hope it's enough of an upgrade.

 

[VirtualLarry]

https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...re-rig-off-ebay-and-thowing-in-a-gpu.2512054/

 

[XavierMace]

If Chrome is inactive, Windows has likely dumped all it's data onto the page file on disk.

 

[sdifox]

My nine year old laptop came with 6gb of ram...

 

[VirtualLarry]

4gb is IMO, barely enough for The Witcher 3 by itself. I'd up to 8gb as the minimum or all the way to 16 to be comfortable.

Or split the difference, and buy an 8GB stick, assuming that his existing 4GB is also in one stick.

 

[whm1974]

Or split the difference, and buy an 8GB stick, assuming that his existing 4GB is also in one stick.

Upgrade to 16GB? I hear the W3 just flies with that much memory.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

If the OP is only configured with 4GB, I could see how he could use more RAM. But there are other possibilities for his situation . . .

I have a Win 7 2700K system and a Win 10 6700K system. Both of them always had 16GB 2x8 installed, tested, running tip-top at full spec. Last year and recurring until maybe March, I could open several tabs in either IE or MS EDGE, and eventually a page would lock up or enter a perpetual loop of "loading . . . loading . . . loading." Sometimes the entire web browser would freeze up. Yes it would hog clock cycles.

On both systems, all of those problems just seemed to disappear earlier this spring. Also, it may have been my IS/AV suite, and I was never able to resolve it for sure.

You can have several active tabs on your browser, and they WILL grab clock cycles with perpetually-updating of animations and other features.

I have 16GB of RAM on the Skylake system, and use about 4GB of that for caching an SSD. I always have plenty for games with some headroom. As a real hardware junkie and addict, I finally could not help myself from ordering a second identical memory kit for 32GB total, and that is at least 8 to 12GB more than I really need. This isn't the first time I dropped more than $150 on an "experiment."

I might have ordered a 2x16 kit for $380 as a better choice. This way, it costs me $184, but I may have to live with lower settings if two identical DDR4 3200 kits aren't reliable at stock speed -- which after all is "overclocked."

Returning to the OP's problem, I'd think he'd be better with at least 2x4 8GB whether it solves his problem or not.

 

[jana519]

Going to pick up 2-4GB of RAM in the next week or so. Thanks for the help all!