Ram Upgrade

[ztdesigninc]

I have a few sticks of 1gb ddr3 ram hanging around, and I thought about putting it in a pc.

The pc has 1 stick of 4gb ddr in it already with one spare slot.

If I added the 1gb stick to make it 5gb do you think there would be much improvement, or really I should only ever add another 4.

I was thinking dual channels would give a slight improvement

 

[EarthDog]

That depends on a few factors...

1. What system is this going in? You do not have a signature or posted mobile which does not attach the sig. We need that information.
2. Do you use 4GB or close to it? Then it would improve performance with a bit of extra headroom
3. What are the speed, timings, and voltages of the sticks? Again, see #1...
4. You should really not add mismatched sticks. Capacity, Speed, Timings, and voltage should be the same for stability purposes.

 

[ztdesigninc]

That depends on a few factors...

1. What system is this going in? You do not have a signature or posted mobile which does not attach the sig. We need that information.
2. Do you use 4GB or close to it? Then it would improve performance with a bit of extra headroom
3. What are the speed, timings, and voltages of the sticks? Again, see #1...
4. You should really not add mismatched sticks. Capacity, Speed, Timings, and voltage should be the same for stability purposes.

Hey Earthdog, it is a dell optiplex 3010 (micro atx form) the ram is 4GB3 DDR3 SDRAM at 1600Mhz - Intel® Core™ i3.

He (my bosses pc) rarely comes near the 4gb usage but has many browsers open at once - so when he is switch between tabs (mainly advfn) it some times crashes or slows down (i'm told)

I do have the same stick in another pc which i could "borrow" but the 1gb are going spare.

I didn't know whether to buy a small form fact graphic card as well or instead of the boast in ram

Cheers for your reply

 

[EarthDog]

1. Since you can configure Dell models, I have no idea what is inside the machine...
1a. You would want to know the timings and voltage as well (CPUz Memory and SPD tabs).
2. As far as the symptoms... depends on a few factors...depends
3. You would want to use the stick you can borrow as it matches as I mentioned above.

5. Why are we talking about a GPU?

Let's get some more detailed system specifications of that PC. You can post screenshots of CPUz main tab, motherboard, memory, and SPD.

 

[ztdesigninc]

Hey Earthdog,

So i took your advice and went straight for the 4gb upgrade rather than doing a real doggy job and just putting 1gb in. It made a lot of difference and you could certainly feel it with microsoft programs.

For the web browser issue, i basically got off my arse and decided to clean it up, see what extensions were running that type of thing. Turned out he had two antivirus programs (with web shields) running and 4 search engine extensions. I also updated to the latest browser. No complaints so far