What should I buy? More RAM or a new SSD?

[Pumo]

Hi everyone.
I would like some suggestion about what should I buy next for my computer, a Core i7 4770 with 8GB 1333MHz RAM and a Kingston 240GB V300 SSD.
I'm kind of undecided whether I should go for 16GB 1600MHz RAM as the next upgrade, or a new bigger (and hopefully faster) SSD (saw a 500GB Samsumg EVO the other day at a decent price at Amazon), specially now that RAM is getting a bit cheaper as well as SSD.

About the RAM, with my current 8GB I made a test and managed to top it at 89% of use running Firefox with 47 tabs open, AIMP playing music and a couple of other programs running while playing Overload at the same time:


I would like to know if you think it really worths to upgrade the RAM.
And about the SSD, this is the benchmark of my 240GB Kingston with latest firmware:



So, what do you think? Should I go for the 16GB of RAM, or for the 500GB Samsung Evo?

[Krom]

The question is what is your PC doing, or not doing that you feel would be solved by getting a larger SSD or more RAM.

Also looking at memory utilization isn't really a good metric to see if you are really running out of RAM or not, a better metric to watch is page file size/usage. Swapping to disk is a clear indicator that something is using more RAM than your system has physically available, but its worth noting that windows memory management will more aggressively do cleanup/garbage collection the less RAM you have. So for instance I have 32 GB of RAM in my system, and only 4.3 GB is actually in use, but an additional 17.5 GB is cached which is either stuff you have used or stuff you might use that the system keeps in memory unless something else needs the space.

As for SSDs, the Samsung 860 EVO isn't terribly faster than the drive you have (no SATA drive is). Going from one SSD to another, even SSDs with massively higher numbers is not like going from a mechanical drive to a SSD. Even going from my 850 Pro to a 970 Pro didn't really make much difference in application load times other than a few outliers and the numbers look like this:




A better reason to upgrade your SSD is if you are running out of storage space and need a larger one, not a faster one.

Honestly I wouldn't put money in to an i7-4770 system (or any quad core) in 2019, AMD Ryzen 3xxx chips on the horizon will likely offer slightly better per core performance but will also give you 2 to 4 times as many cores which will make a dramatic difference in a anything multi-threaded (and modern games are definitely starting to want more than 4 cores). Even right now, AMD Ryzen 2600/X builds are very popular among the gaming crowd for people who want something significantly better than a ~4-6 year old Intel quad core without having to spend a lot on a modern Intel 6 or 8 core system.

[Pumo]

My pagefile.sys file is 3.62GB in size.
In my common daily use, and after running some tests while checking the memory tab of task manager, I get 4GB~ of actually used memory, 3GB~ cached.
Paged pool usually uses about 500 MB.

To be honest I haven't encountered (yet) a situation where I actually felt low on RAM, but I was thinking that more RAM never hurts.
Also, I don't really know, there's any noticeable difference when going from 1333MHz to 1600MHz?

But as you say it, you made me think that it may not worth that much to keep investing in this i7, as I can't make it much more of a 'future-proof' system of it :p

[Krom]

The paged pool and non-paged pool don't actually indicate page file usage. The relevance is paged pool stuff CAN be paged to disk, while the non-paged pool is system critical stuff that must remain in physical memory. But just because something is in the paged pool doesn't mean it is actually in the page file (it just means it can be put there if necessary). The paged pool and non-paged pool will exist even if you disable the page file all together.

My paged pool right now is 507 MB, but my page file usage is 0%. Actually the memory tab of task manger only shows you how much memory/page file is reserved and not how much is actually being used. If you want to know, you have to pull up performance monitor (perfmon) and use it to track %usage of the page file (or you can use something like HWiNFO + Rainmeter + some system monitoring meter to show it on the desktop like I do).

You are correct in that more RAM never hurts (hence why I have 32 GB), but it also doesn't make up for the rest of the system being unable to keep up. I had to upgrade a fairly recent i7-7700k system for an i9-9900k instead because several games I got last year hit the 7700k bottleneck pretty hard. And they weren't hitting a single threaded performance limit of the 7700k, they were just filling up all 4 cores and still having more work left over. A 6 core chip at the same clock speed was performing 30-50% better on the same GPU at the same resolution/settings as I play at, so it was time to pile on the core count.

[Pumo]

Ok, I checked on perfmon, and page file usage % ranges from 3.9~ to 5.2~, even on heavy use.
It seems it's not actually that much.

So I suppose I'm OK on RAM for now, at least until I made a full upgrade on the system as you suggested, but that will be much later, lol
Perhaps for now the SSD will be a better option.

[fliptw]

I have the same, but smaller drive as Pumo, and recently put in an nvme drive. and I think these two pictures tell the tale:

if you where inclined, you can't go wrong with an NVMe drive as the first step in an upgrade.

[Krom]

Except you can; because a motherboard for a desktop 4770 may not have the necessary m.2 slot and or may not even support booting from a PCIe SSD (if for example you used a riser card). Definitely plan for it in the next full system upgrade though.

[fliptw]

my motherboard, bought in 2012, has had support for nvme booting since 2017. the worst case he needs a bios update and a riser card. Even without the ability to boot, there is still benefit from having an nvme.

[Pumo]

My mobo is from 2014, but I think it won't support nvme as it has the B85 chipset and I can't find any BIOS update to enable nvme support.

Now, another question (that is a bit off-topic, by the way) about RAM.
I found a spare DDR3 4GB module from another computer, but it has a different timing and speed. It's a 1600MHz module, with 11-11-11 timing (or at least I suppose? it says 11-11-A1 on the sticker it has)
On my computer I have installed two 4GB modules that are 1333MHz, 9-9-9-24 timing.

What would happen if I mix those three modules, besides working at the slower 1333MHz speed?

[Krom]

It would kick your system down to single channel RAM mode which can cause a significant slowdown in a lot of tasks.

[Pumo]

Ok, I supposed it wouldn't be a great idea to mix them, but it seems it would be worse than I imagined.
Thanks once more for your help, I always learn a lot here!