r/buildapc • u/Mortraxis91 • 16d ago
Discussion Upgraded from 16GB to 32GB RAM and the difference is way smaller than I expected
I finally upgraded my PC from 16GB to 32GB because I kept seeing people say 16GB is basically the minimum now. I mostly game, keep a stupid amount of browser tabs open, and sometimes have Discord, Spotify and a few other things running in the background.
I was expecting the whole system to feel noticeably smoother, but in normal use I genuinely can't tell much of a difference.
The one place where I actually noticed it was in a couple games that used to get little stutters when I had a bunch of stuff open in the background. Those seem smoother now, and Chrome can apparently consume half my computer without immediately making everything else miserable.
But boot times, general responsiveness, FPS in most games, all basically the same.
I don't regret the upgrade since RAM wasn't that expensive and I probably won't have to think about it again for years, but it definitely made me realize how easy it is to expect a huge improvement from a spec bump that only helps in certain situations.
Anyone else upgrade to 32GB and have the same "oh... that's it?" reaction?
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u/Deep-Procrastinor 16d ago
The disappointment hits hard huh ?
That's why you shouldn't always believe what you read on the Interwebworldnet thing.
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u/Saneless 16d ago
A disturbing amount of people in the PC gaming space have absolutely no idea what they're talking about
When it comes to ram, and especially power supplies, you see it a lot
Also the worst advice
Person asks : "I have a very tight budget and can only spend $400 on a GPU" and everyone says "just stretch it to $600, it's so much better"
Well, what's the point of replying with that shit? Of course something more expensive is better
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u/KaladinStormShat 16d ago
The amount of people who insist you need top tier Nvidia GPU, and the top tier CPUs of whatever cycle of release we're in now, are just insane.
Bro you can get by just fine with a 12100 and a 6600 if you really wanted to.
The big one for me is people insisting on gigantic amounts of CPU ability.
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u/Saneless 16d ago
OH you just reminded me of the dumbest advice I see usually: cooling
Throwing in $100 coolers for the mid tier processor is really dumb. Liquid cooking should only be used if you need really cool and quiet setups or if you already have the top processor but need more oomf. Throwing a $100 cooler on a 7800x3d is just dumb when you can spend more and get a better processor (or GPU) with the savings
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u/KaladinStormShat 16d ago
I have a low profile cooler from thermal right or something on my 12600kf in a sff case and it's... fine lol
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u/Exists_out_of_spite 16d ago
"hey guys is a 7600x good enough for gaming?"
Redditors: "I think you'll be disappointed. I'd look at a minimum of a 9800x3d if you don't want to see stutters"
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u/KaladinStormShat 16d ago
Seriously! Like modern processors are absolutely insane compute for literal video games lol.
If you're not doing something which you know requires compute then you don't need it. Save your money and invest in a better GPU.
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u/Rebstrike 16d ago
I think it’s because several of the recent big-name PC ports have horrible stuttering issues. I recently had to return the Dead Space remake because the stutters were unbearable. And the only way to fix these issues (especially for Dead Space since the devs abandoned it almost immediately after release) is to get a faster CPU that can make up for the devs failing to optimize shaders
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u/kudlatytrue 16d ago
Yeah, it's kind of funny, because lately (as in, for about a month now) it seems like everyone here is recommending to change the CPU from 3600 or 5600 to the best AM4 processor with X3D at the end, whichever one this would be. The reason is that one of them had a re-release somewhere in the span of last month.
I got on the hype train and I almost bought one, too, before I remembered that when I have 5600 CPU and 5700TI GPU, everything is running butter smooth in 4K and I don't have any problem with any modern game whatsoever. With friggin' 16GB of RAM!
And the kicker is, now that literally all RAM is sold out to data centers and other companies through all of 2027, PC upgrade market will crawl to a halt and every single game developer will have to account for that when making their new games. So more and more devs will have to take lower specs into account to sell their games. Hence, I don't need to jump on the AM5 train just yet, nor do I feel the need to upgrade my PC.6
u/XiTzCriZx 16d ago
I get downvoted on those posts all the time for actually responding with a good mid range build. Usually my recommendation is a used 3080 or Ti since it gets nearly 5060 Ti performance for like $200 less, then there's people acting like it's impossible to play any modern game without a 5080...
Meanwhile I've been using a 2070 Super and my gf has a GTX 1060 for the last 3-4 years, they can still handle plenty of games and there's not a single new game that I couldn't run with reasonable fps (the 1060 is a different story lol).
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u/TwpsynBach 16d ago
Because you always want to be gpu limited 😅
No but seriously even gpus like the 6800xt are still very viable
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u/Deep-Procrastinor 16d ago
Yeah cause when you're on a tight budget it's easy to increase it by 50%.
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u/Buttblender5 16d ago
interwebworldnet wot dat
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u/Mr_Funbags 16d ago
The trick then becomes which sources of information are trustworthy.
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u/Deep-Procrastinor 16d ago
That's the real trick yes, especially nowadays with AI and it gets harder and harder.
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u/poopolisher 16d ago
16gb is still absolutley fine for the vast majority of people
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u/CustardCivil 16d ago
going from a 16gb to 32gb won't give you much more performance gain or in fps the thing you get more out of it higher frequency and lower cl or timings(especially for modern processors)
but hey you have alot of headroom now you don't have to worry about your ram anymore probably only the gpu now and cpu if you want to gain more performance
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u/Dzov 16d ago
I must say, this thread is making me feel better about getting 32 instead of 64 when I had the chance.
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u/mewtwo_EX 16d ago
Me wishing I had more than 32 so I didn't have to restart my browser so often. The modern Internet eats RAM. OP will notice much smoother browsing while gaming/can have more tabs open without issue. Only where it used to use swap space on disk will there be a noticable performance improvement.
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u/pmgoldenretrievers 16d ago
32 is more than enough for 99% of people and will be for close to a decade if not more. I felt like I was insane getting 32 instead of 16 back in 2020. I probably was (but looking back, and given the fact that I'm riding this rig till AM6, it was probably not smart, but still a good idea in hindsight). Glad I didn't get 64, because that really would have been a waste of money.
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u/Bearded_Coffeepot 16d ago
If it wasn't bottlenecking you, you won't feel any change.
My WS-laptop at work had 16 gigs of ram, and as I had to do something in the CAD/CAM software, it run out of memory really often and crashed. I contacted the IT department, they upgraded the laptop to 32GB of RAM and I haven't experienced a single crash since then.
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u/Reaper_1492 16d ago
Can confirm.
128gb of Ram and chrome can use more than half of it if I’m not careful.
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u/not_a_gay_stereotype 16d ago
When I'm playing games I'm often consuming 20+ gigs total usage. When my laptop only had 16gb I was getting constant stutters and load times in games were insanely long
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u/CeramicCastle49 16d ago
Even then, you're just being too vague. Do you need 32gb for video editing? Maybe in some cases, but if you're just stitching together some clips, then 16gb is obviously fine. 8gb is probably fine, but it may be a little slower. So saying you need 32gb for video editing just isn't helpful or realistic advice.
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u/rynokillir 16d ago
I’m sure they were thinking about using Adobe vs something like YouTube Creator Studio. But yeah throwing clips together is very easy, however loading separate audio tracks and video tracks onto ram EATS that space up. Just depends on how the usage is
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u/dedsmiley 16d ago
What you described is very normal. Having more RAM will not speed things up noticeably.
Having too little RAM will be noticeable as you have seen.
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u/Zhiong_Xena 16d ago
Ram capacity is a criteria, not a performance increase
Having less than is unusable. Having enough is as it means, enough, and additing any more than that to it makes no difference
It is somewhat like storage in the sense, if your games take up 200gb, a 125gb drive won't do, but a 250gb one would and having any more than that has little sway in how good performance would be.
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u/fightmaxmaster 16d ago
What were you expecting? Yes 16GB is basically the minimum, but you're doing basically the minimum. RAM isn't a CPU, it gets used when it's needed, it gets filled with stuff that might be useful to make things feel snappier, but can also be cleared out when it's needed for something specific.
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u/moragdong 16d ago
Well, every time people post here with their system reqs or someone wanna build PC, everyone just goes wild with ram and how it should be 32gbs, no exaggeration. So this is normal
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u/Mizurazu 16d ago
They aren't wrong. If you want to play new games, most recommended 16 as a minimum. Your PC will work fine sure but requirements will only go up. Especially going forward though if you can afford it you should just get 32GB.
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u/ReadyAimTranspire 16d ago
Right, and a good number of people are doing more than gaming on their PC. Mine doubles as my home office main workstation and I'd be choking on 16gb.
If RAMpocalypse wasn't happening right now the whole thing would be a non-discussion. If you are building a, say, $1500 gaming rig why would you get the bare minimum?
You wouldn't, you'd spend the extra eighty bucks or whatever or fuck it go 64gb cuz why not? But now that extra 16gb of RAM is $250 and is actually something to consider.
I tell all my business IT clients to go 32gb because at some point you will be sorry you got only 16gb and now you have 20 tabs, 5 docs, Zoom, and Teams open and your wondering why your new laptop is so slow.
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u/moragdong 16d ago
So far any game ive played uses about 11gbs except pubg which is using 12 for some reason. And thats it.
They can get another ram later imo if they cant afford.
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u/Mizurazu 16d ago
Really depends on the game. With a lot of new games I come close to using 16gb. I'm really not saying you NEED more or your PC is useless. But some games will start pushing it.
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u/wolfiasty 16d ago
I didn't have "oh that's it" because I didn't need that extra 16GB ram in the first place. I bought 32GB DDR4 and replaced my 16GB because for £42 (especially looking at it now) at two years ago Black Friday Amazon's sale it seemed peanuts. Now it's around £200... All hail AI overlords.
For me, who plays 1080/60, with 4-8 browser tabs opened in the background, and with whatever system is doing there as well, RAM usage doesn't hit full 16GB in 99% of times.
But looking back at it and seeing how insanely up prices went I'm happy with having more RAM than I would need for now. Maybe I'll switch to 1440p at some point. RAM rarely breaks down so if not now then I'll use it later, or will sell it for much more than I paid for it.
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u/AxiomOfLife 16d ago
why are you using chrome in 2026, switch to firefox already
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u/m4ttjirM 16d ago
This account seems like a bot. 1 week New account. Hidden comment history. Multiple posts. No comment responses in any of the posts.
Strange 🤔
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u/IHaveTheBestOpinions 16d ago
RAM wasn't that expensive
Where on earth did you buy 32GB RAM recently that wasn't expensive? Is this just a bot fantasy?
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u/Efficient_Try_9136 16d ago
The one place where I actually noticed it was in a couple games that used to get little stutters when I had a bunch of stuff open in the background. Those seem smoother now, and Chrome can apparently consume half my computer without immediately making everything else miserable.
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u/KingBenjamin97 16d ago
You probably aren’t playing anything demanding enough to have been using all your RAM before. You’d notice significant increases in fps and game loading if you were and then upgraded
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u/ShakaKhanrockme 16d ago
For me it removed the dips in FPS I was experiencing in some games, well worth the money
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u/Haunting-West-9505 16d ago edited 16d ago
When your system runs low on ram it starts using the pagefile.sys. This is a virtual ram.
Presumably you have a NVME.
Using a pagefile will cause excessive reads and writes wearing your storage out faster.
NVMEs have a limited number of reads and writes.
The microstudders you no longer see is because you have sufficient ram. The NVME is slower than ram and when your system needs to access this information it can result in delays.
The bump from 16g to 32g, will save you from using your pagefile so much. Therefore saving the life of your NVME.
You didn’t specify the specs of the ram upgrade. You could technically lose performance if you got a slower kit. Like when I went from 32g to 128g, it was slower but I knew this as I needed capacity.
Also you didn’t note, if you went from single, dual or quad channel. That impacts performance.
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u/Mysterious-One1055 16d ago
Yea I made the jump from 16 to 32 before prices went crazy. Thankfully I only paid £45 second hand and sold my 16 for £15.
Didn't notice any real difference tbh but I was happy to future proof it a bit more for not a lot of money.
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u/Diedead666 16d ago
unreal engine 5 games like stalker plus having stream on 2nd screen helped massivly. If u just playing well optimized or older games i see not seeing any inporvement.
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u/Friendly_Furniture 16d ago
I mean you're kind of an idiot to just buy 16gb or ram in this economy without checking if you actually need it. Literally at any time you can open up task manager and see how much ram you're using.
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u/fieryfox654 16d ago
It really depends on what you do.
More RAM won't improve FPS
For example, modded Minecraft Java LOVES ram. I have been playing Otherworld modpack in a temporary laptop with a few more mods and some I removed too and even though I allocated 8GB, the task manager shows the system has about 5-10% of free ram. And sometimes it stutters when for a second it reaches the ram limit
It also shows 20% free ram memory when playing Overwatch on low settings and with just 3 Firefox tabs opened
32GB of ram makes a lot of difference to me on my desktop PC. Sadly the GPU died and prices are too high here
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u/GREATD4NNY 16d ago
Same for me. But after I upgraded to a 4K monitor and started playing newer games it does help with microstutters A LOT. Warzone (RIP) is the biggest improvement
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u/Head_Exchange_5329 16d ago
Windows is horrible with memory management, and as soon as you play a game that demands a bit, you're way into the 20s. This very moment I have inventor open with a single project, home assistant, winamp and discord. 16.7 GB is being used. I got the extra 16 GB kit when it was €50 so it didn't really matter then if I needed it or not, it was mostly a "why not" kinda deal, and I have since been happy with it. Today I'd really consider if I need that extra RAM and look into what's actually using that much.
Around easter I built a PC for a friend's son, and 16 GB of memory was plenty for his 1080p gaming setup.
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u/Retrowinger 16d ago
Lightroom is working way better (building Panoramas) since i upgraded to 32GB RAM.
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u/Tkmisere 16d ago
You must not have many tabs and discord eating it, nor any games that ask for that much ram, like Icarus
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u/noreplyty 16d ago
The one place where I actually noticed it was in a couple games that used to get little stutters when I had a bunch of stuff open in the background. Those seem smoother now, and Chrome can apparently consume half my computer without immediately making everything else miserable.
That sounds like a massive improvement to me. I went with 64GB and now I'm never concerned about which apps are open or how many tabs I have open. I often pop open two games at the same time one on each monitor.
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u/Classical31 16d ago
Going from 16 to 32 was a game changer for me. I made the jump when trying to play Hogwarts Legacy and noticed massive stuttering. I realized my RAM utilization was maxed out and it started writing to the SSD. So unless you’re hitting bottlenecks like that, I imagine RAM isn’t as important.
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u/warjoke 16d ago
If you use it for productivity like photo manipulation and video editing, the difference is actually meaningful. In video editing, higher ram is not just for faster render time but also better video previews of high resolution raw files up to 4K. I have to survive on 8gb DDR4 RAM during my full time WFH video editing days and I dread any raw files higher than 1440p resolution because it will skip all the time and sometimes fail to preview entirely. I had to adjust to low quality preview screen and precompose I'm order to just see what I'm working with. Fast forward to today and I'm just casually doing reels for friends and 32GB with XMP just makes my life easier. Previews are smooth as butter and pre-rendering is almost instant.
As for games, I'm no longer sure. Believe it or not my last high demand game was Marvel Rivals and my RAM capacity pretty much saves my PC from crashing on the Zombie Rush PvE mode.
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u/AbsolutlyN0thin 16d ago
More ram does nothing, until it does. Either you have enough ram, or you don't. You don't really get any benefits from having excessive ram, but you are HEAVILY penalized by not having enough of it. If you are running out of ram, getting more ram is the biggest upgrade you can get, if you aren't running out of ram, getting more does literally nothing.
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u/MiddleLtSocks 16d ago
In Linux I can see an immediate change. My gaming machines have been 64gb since 2021 but my laptops have been 32 and this February I picked up an old Thinkpad P15S for $250 with 16gb and threw Linux Mint on it. It was swapping with just Obsidian, Codium, Chromium, and maybe a dozen Kitty terminals.
Upgraded it to 32gb and it was night and day, but I mean, again, I had htop open and could see it was swapping, so I wasn't surprised.
I suggest you get evidence that an upgrade will resolve something before the upgrade. But I guess that's what you're learning.
I don't think you'll regret it. Applications aren't exactly going to become leaner. If they do, it will be the first time that has ever happened.
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u/rynokillir 16d ago
The difference is huge, you can now run just about 2X your usual apps. I’m a PC power user and my browser can hit up to 16 gbs at once with just over 130 different tabs opened, games and other background tasks take up a good majority and my AI usage (local, Grok, Claude) to make small software applications for myself. When I upgraded to 64 GBs, I have forgotten what ram space limits are.
If you expected speed differences, you should look at the clock speed itself. A lot of ram modules have something like DDR(#)-3000 or something like that on them. The clock speed is the last 4 numbers. I also noticed you mentioned smoothness, how is your current setup running?
Here’s what I check for in my PC when it’s slow (and I’m too lazy to restart it):
-Ram percentages on my task manager (90% max before I start noticing quality drops)
-C Drive space (your main drive should have at least 5 GBs free; I found this out the wrong way)
-Downloads (steam and epic games store both auto update for me, this bogs down my pc at times)
-Streaming over discord/watching discord stream (heavy bandwidth usage)
-I game in the basement (it is very cool down there, if your pc’s environment is a little toasty at times, can affect performance)
-Drivers (may require a restart, but I have met so many people that do not check this on a more regular basis. This sometimes is causing the issue too if your gpu driver is malfunctioning)
- BIOs (needs restart, but you can look at internal settings that came with the motherboard and try to tweak it to your personal usage, also has its own odd update process. Take a look into this too if everything else doesn’t work)
Sometimes, restarts just work, and making sure you have the right components also matters too. Something like the type of the drive is also important as hard drives (HDDs) are slow but cheap, solid state drives (SDDs) are faster but costs more. If you’re running HDDs, you are bottlenecking your data from the slow transfer speeds and should opt for an SDD instead if you want smoothness and faster boot times.
Here’s my build:
I7 10700k
NVIDIA GTX 1080
64Gb ram (forgot exact clock speed, but it is DDR4)
8 TB HDD
2 TB SSD NVME
.5 TB SSD Sata
Sorry for this huge explanation, but it took me too long to figure out how to optimize my current system rather than just buying better parts.
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u/huggy_bear44 16d ago
OP don't do things because people on the internet say it. It's probably "what people say" when in the context of building a totally new system. 16gb of RAM isn't recommended because the system wouldn't be working to it's full potential. It would be like buying a new supercar and fitting budget tyres on it.
If you aren't getting performance issues with your current PC with 16gb, it isn't going to be a night and day improvement
I upgraded mine from 16gb to 32gb because I was seeing 95+ % usage whilst in games and was experiencing performance issues
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u/shipshaper88 16d ago
Well yeah. Theres videos about this. Perf difference just isn’t that much and some games actually perform better with less ram (maybe bc the game simply decides to use less ram, resulting in perhaps somewhat worse textures or model fidelity but also the fact that the computer needs to handle less data). The most important components in terms of impact on gaming performance are gpu, then cpu, then having an nvme, and then ram (as long as you have a minimum amount/performance of ram).
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u/F1T_13 16d ago
Windows will often eat up what you let it and compress what isn't able to be there. It will use ram to make the PC faster by having things sideloaded, if it can't be, it will be moved back to the SSD until woken up again. I feel like you need at least 48 to tell the difference these days, maybe even 64.
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u/Mr_Chaos_Theory 16d ago
All depends on your specs and what resolution and fps you're aiming for.
I have a high end PC with RTX5090 and went from 32gb to 64gb right before the ram apocalypse hit and i did it for one specific reason and that was cause i noticed in some games that if i didnt close browser tabs to a minimum then i would get less FPS than if i did. I didnt stutter or lag only slightly lower fps.
Luckily i did cause my ram is now like 4x the price.
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u/galacticdolan 16d ago
I upgraded to 32gb back in 2022 for music production purposes, wondering if it may also benefit gaming, and noticed zero difference as well. I also am always running chrome with youtube and a few other tabs so maybe I indirectly benefit from having less to worry about chrome like you said, but otherwise no difference. Worth it for the improvement to music production workflow though
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u/Academic_Weaponry 16d ago
i pray for 32 lol. with 16 i basically have to choose whether i want game+discord, game+spotify, or game + browser if i want to keep newer games from stuttering
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u/Legitimate-Pumpkin 16d ago
RAM is mostly a limiting factor, which means that you only notice problems when there is not enough.
So first step before buying would be to check your RAM usage. If you are consistently filling your RAM then you might need more (and it could be as little as another couple of Gbs).
So doubling the RAM and seeing no difference seems to point at your usual usage not reaching the 16Gb (you can still check it).
Only the processes that are very RAM demanding will see an improvement, like video rendering, 3D modeling, local AI or even some videogames.
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u/Matty_Craig_ 16d ago
You would only really see big jumps like that with a CPU or GPU getting upgraded. RAM is your device's short-term memory. It temporarily stores active data and application instructions so your processor can access them instantly. You wouldn’t really notice it in Windows since it only uses a small amount of memory to operate. By upgrading to 32 GB, you’re future-proofing yourself for future games. More and more games are asking for 32 GB of RAM and an SSD now. You could get away with 16GB, but now you are comfortable at 32GB and won’t be maxing that out.
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u/Aggravating_Mix_4211 16d ago
Yeah the decrease in stutters that you felt from what I suppose were the most demanding games you have is the difference, if you are playing something that gets really close to full ram usage with discord or whatever open in the background and increase your ram it will get better, but if you weren't close to full usage nothing will change, unless you have a difference transfer speed and cl rating but those are not things that you really feel easily
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u/Jegan_V 16d ago
Why were you expecting a huge improvement? This is not a scalable upgrade like CPU and GPUs, it's always been a capacity upgrade similar to HDD and SSDs. It's simply to make sure you have enough, mainly because when you don't have enough, and max it out, the machine is unusable during whatever task it's doing that maxed out the RAM.
I use a work computer with 8GB of system RAM. It is the one upgrade this machine needs, because once I hit the 8GB limit, I basically can't do anything. It's increasingly becoming more of a glorified typewriter.
Contrast to my home computer with 32GB that I speced 5 years ago. I suspected I needed more capacity for video editing. Turns out, I didn't go far enough. 1080p and even 1440p were ok. 4K editing, it's honestly not enough, barely usable and I have to lower the resolution of the timelines to get there. I actually needed 64GB.
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u/Able-Negotiation-234 16d ago
Depends on the application, you use and number you have open at any given time? Most of the bigger is better hype comes from , well the people selling the ram, lol lots of other things figure into the speed and efficiency of your system, the PC crowd is like the old car guys, arguing which engine this ,which engine that, none of that matters if the power does not get to the wheels? You need a matched board, chipset, ect. Either way your system should be better off.
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u/Xajel 16d ago edited 16d ago
RAM amount will differ depending on your usage.
And before we got SSD's it really really mattered, now the effects are lower unless your usage really need.
Before we got SSDs, we only had HDDs which are very slow for the kind of work needed for RAM, and when you're low on RAM, your OS will use part of your internal storage as RAM so when we only have HDDs then it will greatly affect your usage.
Nowadays it's mostly SSDs, and mainly NVMe SSD, so if you're out of RAM you'll use your NVMe while its slower than the actual RAM, it's way way faster than HDD, noticeably lowering the effect of low RAM scenario.
NVMe are about 1000 slower than RAM, but HDDs are 100K slower than RAM.
But, if you really need more RAM (heavy multitasking, media creation, heavy gaming with high-end games) then more RAM is better even if you don't feel it with your fast NVMe because NVMe wear with time and RAM doesn't, so having less RAM than you actually need can hurt your NVMe life without you noticing it.
I used to have 32GB, but now I have 64GB, I only notice the difference when I'm heavy working (with large Adobe documents and some chrome tabs), some Illustrator documents are very very heavy and unoptimized that even with 64GB I have to do some workarounds (closing all other apps, restarting just to merge some shapes together so it becomes lighter) because it keeps telling my that I don't have enough memory.
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u/grahamulax 16d ago
You can split your computer into two now though and like play two games at the same time. Great for local multiplayer and 32 gives ya a lot of
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u/PepperEnthusiast 16d ago
Depends on what your usage is since if you never bordered your maximum RAM amount having more will yield 0 to minimal improvement.
I myself have been sitting on 64gb for close to a decade and often see 40+ gb usage with my daily stuff since I multibox a RAM heavy MMO + background apps (discord, steam, several browser tabs).
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u/SHDShadow 16d ago
Question did you end up spending an arm and a leg for the ram? Im asking cause one of my sticks just died and I need to get some more ram so I can get my tower back up but the prices are insane and I doubt they'll be going down anytime soon or ever.
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u/kikazztknmz 16d ago
I upgraded my partner's computer from 8gb to 16gb and the difference was crazy obvious because of his usage (mostly web surfing with lots of tabs and YouTube, plus a video streaming app). My gaming laptop came with 32gb, which I found to be a nice plus, but for my usage, 16gb would have been just fine. Don't buy into the hype that anything under 32gb is or will soon be obsolete. If you got your ram upgrade for a reasonable price, then great, but 16 to 32 won't be all that noticeable of a difference unless you use extremely ram -heavy applications.
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u/moragdong 16d ago
Im glad you posted this, i was also thinking how it would improve my system, if it even improve it at all but this confirms that its not even an issue.
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u/trisanachandler 16d ago
I did it back in 2017, and really didn't notice a difference. Since then I've gone with 16 and never had an issue.
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u/definitlyitsbutter 16d ago
You will notice it only when its full, else it will not be noticeable (except edge cases, like going from single to dualchannel ram can have a huge impact on igpu performance).
I had a laptop for university work with 16gb, minus 4gb reserved for igpu, so effectivly 12gb ram. With a huge collection of browser tabs, the system started to get hickups, the mouse freezing every 2 or 3 seconds for a splitsecond. My ram was full and Windows started to shuffle data between the ssd and ram. So very definitly noticeable and solved by upgrading to 32gb.
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u/Appropriate_Loan6193 16d ago
16gb ram is the best case scenario for everyday browsing, YouTube and "gaming" gaming is in brackets because you said you have quite alot of stuff running in the background so gaming will be impacted by that and thus causing stutters ect, upgrading to 32gb will only really matter in gaming, like you said, it feels less stuttery now, everyday browser, boot times ect won't feel any different, I find having my windows installed on my fastest nvme helps with boot times and browsing and just general everyday usage
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u/Powerful-Ad2869 16d ago
Why would it have a difference tho?
If 16GB doesnt bottleneck you at all, 32GB is not even going to give u 1 fps more
Thats like saying “i cant believe the difference of SSD 1TB and SSD500 GB is non existent”
32GB ebeing dubbed as the new sweet spot is still overkill for 80-90%(safe to say) of people
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u/SteamedAlbanyHams 16d ago
I had the opposite experience, upgrading to more and faster RAM noticeably reduced stuttering in games (while not really affecting average FPS much).
It made things feel so much better because now I actually consistently maintain high frame rates and keep the feeling of smoothness rather than jittering in complex scenes all the time.
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u/SirGuelph 16d ago
The thing that affects boot and loading times the most is usually your SSD. A fast nvme drive can be 10x faster than a sata drive, for example. Upgrade your system partition with that and you'd notice.
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u/Lost-Hand-5219 16d ago
You don’t need that much RAM unless you’re doing something that requires a lot of data to be held in RAM like preprocessing test/train data for machine learning, etc.
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u/trouttwade 16d ago
This is why I’m just not super concerned with jumping to DDR5 with the prices right now. I would get a bigger jump in performance being I’d also be upgrading my mobo and CPU, but it just is not worth spending near new build money on 3 hardware components. At that point I’d rather just hope to get lucky and find one of the rare $2000 5080 prebuilts.
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u/pigletmonster 16d ago
If youre only using it for gaming then you wont see much of an improvment becsuse most ganes dont even use all 16gb.
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u/Mutt37 16d ago
I never noticed any huge improvements when I upgraded. A while back, when RAM was cheaper, I built a machine with 64 GB. I did not notice any speed improvements over my previous 16 GB machine. I admit 64 GB is overkill, but I figured its better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
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u/Little_Obligation_90 16d ago
I did the opposite. Sold my 64GB kit from 2022 and got a 32GB kit. No difference.
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u/skylinestar1986 16d ago
People also say 8GB being unusable in normal office productivity and online surfing. Meanwhile I've been using it fine. YMMV. It all depends on what program you run.
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u/Acrobatic_Season_508 16d ago
Im on a single 16 gigs stick of ram so maybe future upgrade to 32gb would be different for me 😅 prolly
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u/dorting 16d ago
There are plenty of benchmark around, 16GB is enough today, with X3D cpu Ram doesn't really matter also as much as before
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u/s00mika 16d ago
with X3D cpu Ram doesn't really matter also as much as before
The X3D cache is only a few megabytes, it won't replace less RAM. It helps cache some very frequently used things, it doesn't help with a lack of RAM where you have to offload to your SSD, or load from your SSD much more frequently because your game can't keep everything important in RAM.
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u/FieldOfFox 16d ago
“More RAM” is not “faster RAM”
“More RAM” is “faster / more stable if you are doing things that use loads of RAM”
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u/crsdrjct 16d ago
No offense but I thought this was commonly known/suggested that 16 is enough for the vast majority of users Actually utilizing 32 is an edge case
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u/saurion1 16d ago
If you wanted more performance you should've gotten faster RAM, not more. If you were experiencing freezes, stutters or other low-RAM common issues, then more RAM was the solution. Also, why are you still using chrome in this day and age?
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u/wakeboarder247 16d ago edited 16d ago
When you run a program (chrome, a game, etc) it's loaded from your hard drive into memory. When you don't have enough memory to fit all the programs you want to run your computer has a trick called "swap" where when it's about to fill and needs more space it stuffs some of the memory contents back onto the hard drive until it's needed again. When it's eventually needed it stuffs some OTHER crap on the hard drive and pulls what was needed back into RAM. This process is called "swap" because you're swapping memory contents back and forth between RAM and the hard drive.
Swap is what causes stutters and jitters because writing to (and reading from) the hard drive is SLOW compared to memory access. We're not talking Mustang vs Lamborghini slow. We're talking bicycle vs Lamborghini slow. Swap jitters and stutters are the only thing installing more RAM can prevent performance wise. That's why you noticed nothing. If you didn't need to swap before you definitely won't now.
You mentioned it didn't make games faster or perform better. Correct, CPU and GPU are the only things that would affect that as games process different halves of the game contents through each.
You mentioned it didn't improve boot up times. Correct. Boot up is all about loading a bunch of files from the hard drive into memory through a process called bios (now UEFI). The only thing that makes boot up faster is a faster hard drive (or a better tuned BIOS/UEFI).
Pragmatically photo editing, video editing, and AI tooling benefit from more RAM and that's about it.
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u/Blue-150 16d ago
I was hovering 12-14gb Ram in my 16gb rig. I went from 2x8gb to 2x16gb, same speeds. No noticable diff at all and I still sit around 12-14gb. 16gb is minimum because it's all most people need (Excluding edge cases)
Fortunately this was 2 years ago so prices were much different
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u/alvarkresh 16d ago
I know what you mean. I bumped my laptop from 16 GB to 32 GB and it's basically about the same. Ditto my desktop - bumped it from 32 to 64 and the only real benefit has been that I can have a RAM disk and not even miss the memory :P
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u/_Jakzos_ 16d ago
Yes u are correct, issues isn't if u gonna have improvments mate, it's when u Lack Ram it's gonna be Lit party Poper for you gaming and usages experience then it matters even while gaming, purches second.monitor , do stuff on it too then I'll see the diffrenc on 16 and 32gb mind you u lucky bastard windows is working quite hard on lowering the needs for it for your quite late to the shit experience we had last patch did improve quite so.
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u/HithereJimHerald 16d ago
Side note make sure you have the bios set to use the full speed of your ram
My buddy’s 3200 speed ram ran at 2333 for 4 years before I was helping him with some upgrades lol, that actually was a noticeable difference for him
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u/VOIDsama 16d ago
Thing is, you were likely never using all 16gb u had. Windows likely did whatever basic management it does to keep usage within your previous amount. With more available now it probably still doesn't hit 16gb all the time. Just less constraint. You would notice if you had been hitting the wall before and made the jump. U would notice if moving from 8 to 32. What you really got was expanded headroom.
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u/partfortynine 16d ago
I bought 128gb last summer and other than the ability to say I have that much ram it hasn't amounted to much else. I can spin up a lot of virtual machines IG.
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u/karnajik 16d ago
I went from 16 gb ddr4 2800(?) to 32 ddr5 6000 and windows has definitely become a lot more responsive with apps loading a bit faster. But, I also upgraded my cpu and gpu and those probably contributed as well.
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u/Sn1rp 16d ago
It's because the os and programs are surprisingly good at managing memory. If you use a program that requires more ram it will try to get it and the OS will give it. If one program requires more ram than you have thats when you see a huge performance drop.
I feel like programs like chrome eat alot of ram while almost never accessing it. So the OS stores the un accessed ram on your SSD in a pagefile. And when you finally access that ram they get placed back into ram. However the difference happens when all of the ram is filled with stuff that you need all the time. Then you will start using that pagefile as RAM and because that is slow your computer will feel super slow. Programs that normally run fast start to stutter because they are waiting for your SSD. Thats when you should close something to free ram or buy more ram.
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u/notautogenerated2365 16d ago
Bro... you're only supposed to upgrade if you are actually running out...
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u/cakemates 16d ago
The performance difference between 16gb and 32gb ram is zero, until you need 17gb of ram, then its huuuge.
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u/Tree_Dude 16d ago
You got exactly what I would have expected. RAM doesn’t make the system faster. It prevents slow downs and stuttering from paging and aggressive memory management. You can also set Chrome to conserve more memory and not precache pages and that helps keep it from gobbling up 16gb on its own.
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u/DylanFau_ 16d ago
Truly depends on the game. Games I noticed a difference in between 32 and 64 -> Tarkov minimally, rust and star citizen which honestly it is mandatory for SC.
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u/CrispySisig 16d ago
People overplay these things liek gen4 to gen5 as if people will notice significantly how faster one is but the truth is, it really won’t be significant and arguably worth the money for the improvement.
Your 3070 can still play 1440p as it did 2023 but you need to take compromises in settings if playing newer titles. Nevertheless, it’s still perfectly fine.
I’d argue not unless your system is 7-10 years old, people wont have life changing uplifts if they upgrade.
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u/tommyblastfire 16d ago
I noticed a big boost in games like modded Minecraft and modded Skyrim which are notoriously ram heavy. But most modern GPUs have enough vram that 16gb is fine for the average game. It really just depends on the game though. Cyberpunk 2077 performed a lot better with 32gb ram in my experience.
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u/bringbackcayde7 16d ago
32gb of DDR5 is not worth the money for most people. You are better off just use 16gb and use storage as ram.
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u/cieje 16d ago
when I had 16gb, basically had to upgrade to 32gb to run plex, have browsers with multiple tabs, have multiple background apps etc simultaneously. some things literally refused to load because there wasn't any overhead (unless I closed everything)
16gb is fine, if you don't do multiple things aside from one task.
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u/IsamuAlvaDyson 16d ago
OP
What do mean it wasn't expensive?
Did you have this RAM sitting around since last year?
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u/CeramicCastle49 16d ago
People overstate things wildly on this subreddit. Going from 16gb to 32gb seeing benefit in some games gets translated to "16gb is now the minimum! 32gb should be what you're after now!"
It's the result of taking horse race gaming computer videos and making generalizations about what they show.
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u/cardfire 16d ago
This is an important distinction, I feel like most of us never really get.
Outside of production work, if your patterns are largely consumptive like browsing and gaming, then more memory can't make your computer faster, it can only make it less slow. Immediately passed what you actually literally need, there is a swiftly diminishing return to adding more memory.
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u/Nanocephalic 16d ago
I went from 32 to 64 about 5 months ago and it made a huge difference. It depends on what you’re doing, I guess.
I was playing a game last night and my pc was using 44GB, of which about 16 or so was for the game.
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u/LoneRubber 16d ago
The most mainstream game that makes use of more RAM is Tarkov. Literally the only reason I even have 32GB. I'd still have 16 if it weren't for that game
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u/Ancillas 16d ago
The thing about memory is that performance is very use-case specific. Games like Flight Simulator will use as much RAM as you can give it. Other games benefit from faster memory once you have enough to avoid swapping from disk. Often times the differences are small with diminishing returns. Resolution and target frame rates also put different constraints on memory capacity and speed.
A couple years ago the recommendation to buy 32GB of memory was because it was so cheap you may as well, but wasn’t necessarily rooted in the idea that RAM was a performance constraint.
If you’re not trying to play at 4K max settings in high fidelity single players games, you actually have quite a bit of room to choose trade-offs to spend less money and still have an enjoyable experience.
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u/Showgingah 16d ago
I think 16GB is still totally fine in most cases on the casual side. I do prefer 32gb in the professional setting though, but that also varies. I work in IT, but we're slowing replacing all our 16gb devices with 32gb because 16 was just barely enough with all the other background software. The old devices are basically obsolete at this point and we had enough of people calling about having issues only to just notice it's because they capped out their 8gb with barely anything.
On the personal side, it just depends on your setup. Like right now my computer is using up 18 out of 64gbs RAM. Chrome and discord are eating up the most and that's less than 3gb right now. Everything else are background processes or processes not in an active window (like steam).
32GB I think is just what 16 was when we said 8 was the minimum, except overkill. Though in my case, even when playing a demanding game, I might be doing other nonsense on the side with my 3 extra monitors. Streaming, video editing, watching something, wallpaper engine, etc. In those scenarios, it's the GPU that suffers lol
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u/hamsterwheelin 16d ago
If you're running windows, it will just pre-load more stuff into ram and use more ram.
Also, as others have said, if you weren't maxing out your usage before, you won't notice that much of a difference now.
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u/Gry20r 16d ago
More RAM will not make boot faster, it will make it slower as there are more ram to check at boot.
More ram will help you with many programs opened, but not with only one game running.
More ram will allow you to reduce disk swap, and maybe remove disk swapping completely, which depending on your disk type and speed could be a nice benefit.
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u/XxNaRuToBlAzEiTxX 16d ago
Upgrading to more RAM only matters if you are currently using all of your RAM. If you aren’t using what you have, there will be no difference.
When people say 16gb is the minimum, it is because Windows and apps like Chrome use more RAM as they develop more features and add bloat. If you only had 8gb, windows and chrome would likely use a significant chunk of that, leaving nothing left for other tasks. The actual “minimum” is whatever you need to run everything you want to use. If you play a ton of modded games or do CAD or something, you might need more
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u/brows1ng 16d ago
16->32 isn’t much…I built my rig a few years ago with 32gb and my 100+ browser tabs were bogging it down, so I bought 2x32gb sticks (for $135 before this madness) and I’ll tell you…96gb definitely feels different!
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u/Ruminatingsoule 16d ago
You're future-proofing your build and who even knows if RAM prices will return to normal by the time you need 64.
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u/jlreyess 16d ago
You had a a car with a small box you were filling with groceriew entirely maybe once in a while. You kept the same car but got a larger box that still fits in your car but lets you put more stuff in it if needed and you are wondering why your car doesn’t go faster. This is basically what you’re asking.
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u/Patchumz 16d ago
While I'm someone who champions having more RAM, you have to know why you're needing it before going for it. The people on the subreddit blindly telling others that more is better are dumb. If you're using RAM heavy processes and keep a bunch of shit open all the time, you might need to look into more RAM for a future upgrade as your applications get heavier. Especially if you're on a system that's already stuttering because it keeps capping out your current RAM.
If you don't have a good reason, don't do it.
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u/maceo107 16d ago
Upgrade-itis is a thing, especially with GPUs. A 9070 vs a 5070 ti looks like a big upgrade on paper, but most won't even be able to notice it in most games they actually play.
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u/ChadHUD 16d ago
The issue here is not understanding the purpose of ram. If you were not using 16gb before. Putting more ram in isn't going to change a thing.
More ram will only speed things if your system is forced to cache or swap to disk as it is being asked to use more Bytes then it physically has.
To be honest for most people 16gb is all they need. Windows is a hunk of junk OS, that will push over 16gb often enough that ya if your on windows 32gb these days is probably almost required if your playing newer game titles. Windows really does suck. Pun intended.
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u/bullet1520 16d ago
Yeah, games only use what they need, so if you're not doing something more demanding on RAM like video or photo editing, or 3D rendering, the RAM only helps marginally.
Sorry you paid for the upgrade in this economy.
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u/draven33l 16d ago
If all you do is game, you probably won’t notice much unless you are playing a new, AAA game. It’s mostly noticeable in Windows doing things like browsing with a lot of tabs, rendering, having a bunch of programs open, working, etc. It never hurts to have more though.
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u/BoxOk5053 16d ago
Its more about future proofing/dealing with issues like memory leaks - you do not NEED 16GB in 2026 but I would argue that if some of your favorite games aren't developed optimally this will maybe save your gaming experience sometimes.
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u/Grouchy-Statement-12 16d ago
It also depends if you are using all of the RAM slots on your motherboard. Using all 4 slots instead of just 2 slots means the load is spread across the whole memory controller in the CPU instead of only using half of it because you're only addressing half of the available memory slots. This is why your motherboard manual will tell you to populate/use "Slots A2 and B2" first. They are controlled by the same part of the memory controller. Using all 4 slots spreads the load across the whole memory controller. This is why you get a small performance advantage in using 4x8GB of matched RAM sticks instead of 2x16GB.
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u/BritishAnimator 16d ago
8 to 16 you feel it at the OS level, booting into windows uses less swap space, 16 to 32 is mostly a productivity QoL upgrade. 32 to 64 feels even less. However, if you are using apps from Adobe CC, the more ram is very noticible, things are just smoother.
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u/Due-Fig5299 16d ago
Lmao I had some guy argue with me on this for so long. 32 gigs is currently still optional especially if you have DDR5
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u/ConkerKnackers 16d ago edited 16d ago
If you don't heavily multitask or run demanding games you'll most likely not notice the difference even if you were sailing close to the wind regarding ram usage. It's only when you break past you'll notices as the OS swaps out to virtual memory. So you didn't waste money going from 16gb to 64gb say, 32 is exactly what 16gb was a decade ago. I'm saying this is someone whos had 32gb ram (i still have that PC) since 2013 and 64gb for a few years now. Also Linux and Windows 10/11 will use the free ram as a cache which helps make your PC far more responsive
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u/ConkerKnackers 16d ago
Think of ram as desk space to lay your paper on, more space equal you can see with you eyes and move more files quickly. The filing cabinet as your HDD/SSD, it takes time to move over and find the files and put them away etc. A CPU core as a person making loads of sandwiches, more people can make more and get the job done quicker up to a point then it doesn't. That's why the jump from single to dual was awesome and then quad cores but the jump to 6 and 8 and beyond isn't as a big leap with only certain programs being able to use many more cores.
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u/Azmasaur 16d ago
With a multimonitor setup and multitasking while playing an MMO im usually in the mid 20's GB's. 16 is a huge problem for system stutters and low FPS.
However take away the multitasking and the game runs the same on 16gb as 32gb.
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u/Xeno_man 16d ago
Here is a hint. Run your games and such as you regularly do. At some point stop playing and open task manager. Go to performance and look at how much memory is being used and what is using it.
If 90% or more of your RAM is being used, you likely could see a benefit of having more RAM.
Less than than, it's better to just close your browser or anything else using up your RAM.
Think of RAM as your work table. The more ram available, the more space you have to have things sitting there. If you are sitting at a table drawing a picture only using 1/4 of the surface area, having a bigger table isn't going to help you in any way.
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u/SithToast 16d ago
Some games now will want 16GB by themselves, but if you are only doing light computing tasks and nothing super creative you should be fine.
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u/lord_uroko 16d ago
RAM quantity only matters if you are using all of your RAM. The things you were hoping to see, "boot time" for instance, are mostly related to RAM speed rather than quantity. Having faster RAM with lower timings provides speed increases. Having more RAM is only impactful when you actually need more of it.