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Is upgrading RAM from 4GB to 8GB worth it?

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dredd2929

Senior member
Has anyone out there seen a performance increase when going from 4GB DDR2 to 8GB DDR2? I use Windows 7 64 bit pro, and I've noticed some slow-down and even the occasional freeze when watching Flash movies in IE and other random situations. Right now I don't have time for games (and won't for a while)...just email, word processing, and surfing. I'm debating if it's worth it to throw another 4GB in there. Here the rest of my specs:

E8400 3.0 GHz
ASUS P5Q
8800 GTX
Kingston 2 x 2GB DDR2 800
 
Would you see $30 to $40 worth of extra performance by adding 4GB? Probably not with your use. For change you could actually feel, the money would be likely be better spent toward an SSD...
 
Agreed with FishAk. There will be improvement, but if you already have 2x2Gb, adding 2x2Gb may cause the RAM to overheat because they are too close together. Yes, you can fan a RAM fan, but I really can't say that will give you the increase in performance for the money you spend on that. SSD is a bit more expensive, but the increase in performance far exceed adding 4 gb RAM.
 
dredd2929 said:
E8400 3.0 GHz
ASUS P5Q
8800 GTX
Kingston 2 x 2GB DDR2 800
Click to expand...

Only if you have the money to burn. I did it but not noticing a difference (was not expecting it for day to day activity). While I do not do much that would need the extra ram (outside window's caching), I did it to upgrade from 666Mhz to 800Mhz RAM (trying a a bit of overclocking to get another 6 or so months from the system). 8GB of DDR2 was about the same price as I paid for the new cpu cooler, so I was not that fussed about it.

Though I already have a SSD and other decent parts (v'raptor,GTX570 ect).

As to the Flash program not running properly, I suspect that is just flash. nothing to do with your hardware.

Personally, depends on how much longer you want to hold onto the system. A SSD or new GPU might help your needs, some overlocking might as well for the short term. RAM is proberly the last on the list to spend money on unless expecting to hang onto the system for quite a while longer (I suspect what I paid for my DDR2 is about as cheap as it will be before going up in price again as it's production is ramped down).
 
A C2D with 4GB of ram is more than enough for what you are using your computer for. You should even get some half decent gaming from that rig.

IE is pants at the best of times, though has improved since IE8 and 9. It's more likely Windows issues which are causing your problems and not your RAM. Format maybe? I certainly would before considering more hardware.
 
Seero said:
adding 2x2Gb may cause the RAM to overheat because they are too close together.
Click to expand...

given the amount of power ram uses, I find that laughable.

adding heatsinks and fans to ram is a marketing gimic 99% of the time. The rest are so overvoltaged that they proberly overheat WITHOUT anything next to them.
 
Unless your running out of memory and using pagefile more memory wont help anything.

If your having performance issues with the current active app (i.e. ' Flash movies in IE') then its almost certainly not a memory issue.

Memory is like a bucket, if it holds enough water then it does its job, adding another bucket doesnt help if you only want half a bucket of water..

(tho windows will prefill those buckets with likely needed stuff when it boots, this isnt really used).
 
dredd2929 said:
Has anyone out there seen a performance increase when going from 4GB DDR2 to 8GB DDR2? I use Windows 7 64 bit pro, and I've noticed some slow-down and even the occasional freeze when watching Flash movies in IE and other random situations. Right now I don't have time for games (and won't for a while)...just email, word processing, and surfing. I'm debating if it's worth it to throw another 4GB in there. Here the rest of my specs:

E8400 3.0 GHz
ASUS P5Q
8800 GTX
Kingston 2 x 2GB DDR2 800
Click to expand...

Probably not see much performance improvement. If your workload does require more RAM though then it will help. For example, some of my renders have required 6 GB of RAM, but I only had 4 GB so the computer was swapping like crazy. That's when I added more RAM, and things are just peachy now.
 
There is a difference, superfetch works better with 8gb setups and things get snappy, if you go down the 16gb ram route then consider using a software based cache for upping your disk drive performance, i'd like to remind that there's nothing more nerve wrecking and a more pathetic pc experience other than a ram full page file hitting crawling system.
 
rbk123 said:
So you're saying he may see a difference or he may not?... nice
Click to expand...
Yes. I really don't see a point, unless you have a usage pattern that fits it. If you're sitting there grinding at the disk, of course you need more RAM. Task Manager is the easiest place to figure out where you lie between having plenty of RAM for what you do, and not. A list of applications is not nearly as good as knowing your regular RAM usage. A 2GB PC could do all the OP mentions, or, if he's all of it all the time, with a ton of browser windows up, 4GB may be dragging a bit.
 
Thanks all for the input. I think I'm just going to wait it out until I have to time and money to upgrade my whole system.

It's looking like you all were right about it not being a memory problem. I know this is probably for another forum, but I'm taking an online course with Flash video lectures, and I just watched the Physical Memory Usage go from 35% to 65% in one 90 minute video. This has got to be why the videos are slowing down. The process hogging all them memory is called "plugin-container.exe *32". This process was about 900MB by the time my lecture was over, and it disappeared as soon as I closed Firefox and all the memory was freed up. It must be the Adobe Flash plugin. My question is, how do I fix this? I did some searching online, and it look like I'm not the only to have this problem. One place suggested trying the 64-bit beta (v11.0.1.98), which I did, but the problem remains. Tried disabling hardware, same. Have any of you guys had this problem?

*I moved the question to Software for Windows
 
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