Hey everyone! I'm in a bit of a dilemma. A friend is offering to gift me his old RAM, and I need your advice. Right now, I've got 16 GB of 3600MHz DDR4 RAM (Kingston Fury Beast RGB). However, my friend has 32 GB of 3200MHz DDR4 RAM (G.Skill TridentZ RGB) that I could take. My main question is: would this be an actual upgrade for my gaming PC, or not? Just to give you some context, my setup includes an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT GPU and an Intel Core i5-13600KF CPU, all on an ASRock B660M PRO RS motherboard. I'm primarily gaming—playing everything from League of Legends to AAA titles. I also dabble in recording for YouTube, even though I haven't posted anything yet. Thanks in advance for your help! By the way, both setups have 8GB RAM sticks, meaning my current setup has 2 sticks while the new one would have 4.
2 Answers
Honestly, upgrading to 32GB could be beneficial if you're doing a lot of gaming and recording, especially with AAA titles that can use more RAM. However, the lower speed (3200MHz) might slightly impact performance compared to your current 3600MHz. If you find yourself running out of memory during gaming or recording, going to 32GB might be the right choice, though! But if you mostly play lighter games and your PC runs smoothly, sticking with what you have could also be fine.
I think you should consider what you do most. For gaming alone, 16GB is usually fine, but if you want to record while playing or run other apps in the background, the extra RAM would definitely help. Just be aware that mixing RAM speeds usually means they'll both run at the speed of the slower stick, which in this case is 3200MHz.
That's a good point! Mixing speeds can lead to performance drops, so just be cautious about that if you decide to switch.
Yeah, 3600MHz is definitely faster, but if you're multitasking a lot or working on projects for YouTube, the extra capacity could help more than the slight speed difference.