Upgrade advice please

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huxtable

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#222731 26-Aug-2017 01:08

I did a major upgrade of my desktop pc in 2015, and am now quite keen to upgrade a couple of components - but I'm not really up to speed with specs these days so some advice would be appreciated.

My Mobo/CPU/RAM is:

Gigabyte GA-B150M-D3H Intel B150 DDR4 mATX LGA1151 Motherboard
Intel Skylake Core i5-6500 3.20Ghz, 6MB, LGA1151 Processor
Corsair CMK8GX4M2A2400C14R Vengeance LPX 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4-2400 CL14

As I do a lot of multitasking, Lightroom, some video editing etc, I'm quite keen to upgrade to 16GB RAM.

I see that ComputerLounge (where I ordered from previously) has the following available for $120:

Corsair CMK8GX4M2A2400C14 Vengeance LPX 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4-2400 CL14

http://www.computerlounge.co.nz/components/componentview.asp?partid=25119

This looks *almost* identical to the RAM I have. Could I simply purchase this, then add these two DIMMs to the two I currently have for a total of 16GB RAM?

If so, it seems a pretty affordable way to get a wee performance boost.

Cheers

michaelmurfy

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#1852851 26-Aug-2017 01:15

The simple answer here is you likely don't need it nor will see any performance boost.

The long answer - if you're doing a bit of video editing / lightroom dealing with files straight from a SSD is the way to go - maybe invest in a secondary SSD to store your working files on and if you have not got a SSD already then get that as it'll give you the biggest performance boost of them all.

I do quite a bit in Adobe apps and tonnes of multitasking and rarely go above 8gb of ram used (and this is on a workstation with 32gb of ram). If you're dealing with huge files then maybe 16gb will be good for you but I would add a SSD too for your working data. My working model is as follows:

1) A SSD raid for my main OS drive and common apps (256GiB). Really don't need this...
2) A SSD for working files, some games I often play etc (275GiB) - also used to store virtual machines on.
3) A SSHD (Hard Drive with SSD cache) for storage (4TiB).

Finally - that ram will work with your current setup assuming you've got enough ram slots and will be considered a matching pair.

Michael Murphy | https://murfy.nz
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huxtable

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Master Geek
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#1852852 26-Aug-2017 01:25

Thanks for the suggestion. I did add a 128GB SSD at the same time, which has Win10 and a few key apps installed - and you're right, it was an incredible upgrade.

I often have loads (~30) Chrome tabs open along with Lightroom, Football Manager, Video editing, Photoshop (not all at once) seem to push the memory to the limit on occasion. Chrome seems to be the biggest culprit! (no surprises when I have that many tabs open, not a great habit I know, but just the way I operate :) )

michaelmurfy

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#1852855 26-Aug-2017 02:01

@huxtable Yes, Chrome is quite memory hungry. I have upwards of ~200 tabs open right now (in multiple windows). So far with Photoshop, Chrome, a Linux VM and a bunch of other things running I am using just over 12GiB ram. The VM in my case is the real killer since I have 4GiB ram allocated to it.

I would suggest grabbing another SSD in your case too. Honestly, Lightroom especially (when you're dealing with raw files) handles so much better when your files are stored on a SSD. You'll likely find of your ram use a large proportion of that is just cache - it is normal for Windows to use any ram it can get its hands on for caching.