RAM upgrade, prebuilt Gus update #2

"ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com" (ita97) 05/01/2018 at 01:12 • Filed to: None

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No, not that kind of ram...

I picked up a second 16GB stick of DDR4-2400 for my PC and stuck it in tonight. Do I need 32GB? Not really, but I found a good enough deal via ebay on a used, matching stick to what my PC came with originally. I’ve never actually had a PC of mine run in dual channel before, as I’ve always ended up buying a second stick of RAM years later down the road when finding a matching stick would be difficult or impossible.

It worked, even if the sticks ended up being different weeks of production.

Is there a difference? The mouse dyno would like to say that certain things are a bit snappier, but it’s hard to say. I didn’t really benchmark anything before, I just wanted to try it out and fill that open slot.

This is my prebuilt Dell gaming system that I picked up last year instead of building my own. Insanity in the GPU market (eff you, cryptominers), meant that I was able to pickup a Ryzen 7/16GB RAM/RX 580 8GB prebuilt PC for about the cost of what an RX 580 itself was selling for itself last year (if you could find one at all). It pained me to not build my own, but I couldn’t have come close to buying all the parts for the same cost at that time. In my first installment of prebuilt Gus, I added a Crucial MX500GB SSD as the boot drive to go along with 1TB HDD it came with. I also upgraded the cooling a bit in the form of adding a Noctua 92mm to supplement the 92mm cheapo case fan dell supplied. 32GB of DDR4 ought to be ample for as long as the system will be relevant for playing racing sims and posting on oppo.

Have a real Ram. Growing up, my best friend’s dad had a truck identical to this one. My family borrowed it often for doing truck things. Sadly, he traded it in in 2004ish with only around 70k on the odometer. Had it told me he was in the market to buy a new car, I would’ve bought it from him the next day for more than he got trading it in.

Axial > ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com 05/01/2018 at 02:57

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It’s not a real Ram if it can’t take Dorothy flying!

facw > ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com 05/01/2018 at 07:05

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It’s a pity RAM is so expensive. When I built my current PC in 2011, I paid $80 for 16GB of (admittedly not very fast) DDR3. Today it looks like I’d be paying nearly twice that for DDR4 (and I would probably want 32GB).

In any event, getting a second stick is smart for you, since it probably allows it to work in dual-channel mode, so you should have more bandwidth, even if you don’t really need the storage (modern OSs are usually pretty good about using that extra space for disk caching as well).

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > facw 05/01/2018 at 10:32

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Going dual channel was the only reason behind the upgrade.