I currently have 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3000 RAM in two 8GB sticks, and it seems to be a bottleneck in my build. My system uses a Ryzen 5 5600 and a 7080 XT. RAM usage reaches nearly 100% in some modern games, while idle usage is around 50%. Should I add another 16GB using the same speed, or replace the current kit with faster RAM?
3 Answers
Faster RAM will not help much if your main problem is running out of capacity. If you install a faster kit alongside the existing DDR4-3000 memory, the system will generally run all the sticks at the slower kit’s speed. Replacing everything with a 32GB 3600MHz kit could offer a small performance improvement, but it is much more expensive and probably unnecessary for this situation.
Adding another matching 2x8GB kit is the sensible option. DDR4-3000 is perfectly usable on a Ryzen 5000 system, and moving from 16GB to 32GB should help more than increasing memory speed when games are already filling your RAM. Mixing kits can sometimes require lowering the memory speed or adjusting BIOS settings, so try to match the specifications as closely as possible.
Before buying anything, check what is using the 50% idle memory and monitor CPU usage, GPU usage, temperatures, and RAM usage while gaming. Nearly full RAM in a demanding game is a stronger reason to upgrade capacity than the fact that the memory is several years old. For your setup, 32GB should be a good target, and adding matching RAM is the cheapest starting point.
That makes sense. I was worried the age of the sticks meant they were slowing down, but I’ll look for another matching kit instead.