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View Full Version : Worth Upgrading from 4gb to 8gb ram?



mamamia88
January 6th, 2015, 05:40 PM
I have an older dell optiplex 745. I upgraded the cpu recently from a pentium d to a c2d e6700. I threw in a discreet hd 5450 and an ssd I was no longer using. It has 4gb ram with 1gb in each slot so I would have to throw away the ram. Maybe I can sell it on ebay and pay for half the ram upgrade or so. I usually only have chrome+thunderbird+minitube open. Occassionally I'll rip a dvd with makemkv, encode it with handbrake, or watch youtube videos either natively in chrome or on minitube. Do you think it would be worth upgrading the ram? To put it in perspective the upgrade would probably cost $60 ish when the computer can be bought for $100 ish. But, seeing how it's so cheap nowadays I will probably keep it around for the long haul.

kerry_s
January 6th, 2015, 05:47 PM
4gb is plenty, i only have 2gb & do those same things.

schragge
January 6th, 2015, 07:11 PM
There's a project going on here that tries to utilize all available RAM to speed up your system. If you decide to upgrade RAM, you may want to give it a shot. Actually, you could try it out with 4GB RAM you currently have to see how it works for you. I guess to get the most of it and conserve some RAM you should put /home on a separate partition, although it goes without it, too, especially if you have plenty of RAM. You may also have /boot on a separate partition, but it seems like RAM Booster will copy it to RAM anyway, don't know why. But better ask the script author, terminator14 (http://ubuntuforums.org/member.php?u=572729). He's pretty active here in forum, and always happy to answer questions about his software.

kpatz
January 6th, 2015, 07:20 PM
It depends. If you open a lot of tabs in your browser and the system slows to a crawl when it starts swapping, then you need more RAM.

If this never happens, even at full load, then you don't need more RAM (though more can't hurt, and will speed things up by allowing more cache).

I have an old machine with 2 GB RAM and Mint MATE and I can max that out with 6-8 Chromium tabs depending on what sites I'm going to.

mamamia88
January 6th, 2015, 07:59 PM
I usually have 2-3 pinned tabs and maybe 3-5 other tabs opened at a time. I have 2 chrome windows, parole, terminator, thunderbird and 6 tabs between the 2 windows open and am only using 52% of ram right now. I usually only encode video when I'm sleeping or watching a movie on a different tv.

ajgreeny
January 6th, 2015, 10:03 PM
I can keep an eye on ram usage in conky which is on my desktop.

I admit I have 8GB ram on my machine, but the difference in cost when it was being built was so small that I couldn't resist the extra. However, even when running two or more VMs of either Windows XP, Ubuntu , Xubuntu or Lubuntu, I have never got anywhere near maxing out my ram; I can't even remember using more than 4GB, so I suspect for the things you're doing 4GB will be plenty.

mips
January 6th, 2015, 11:23 PM
no point going to 8GB unless you are running out of ram which i doubt

mamamia88
January 7th, 2015, 01:04 AM
I can keep an eye on ram usage in conky which is on my desktop.

I admit I have 8GB ram on my machine, but the difference in cost when it was being built was so small that I couldn't resist the extra. However, even when running two or more VMs of either Windows XP, Ubuntu , Xubuntu or Lubuntu, I have never got anywhere near maxing out my ram; I can't even remember using more than 4GB, so I suspect for the things you're doing 4GB will be plenty.

Yeah I don't do vms. I have an old windows 7 netbook sitting in a corner on the very rare need of windows for if i brick my phone or something.

HermanAB
January 8th, 2015, 05:57 PM
Ancient American proverb (circa 1980):
You can never be thin enough,
rich enough,
or have enough memory in your computer.

mamamia88
January 8th, 2015, 07:10 PM
Well I got paid today more than I thought I would (birthday bonus) so went ahead and grabbed some.

kurt18947
January 8th, 2015, 09:26 PM
I have HTOP installed. When I'm curious about RAM & CPU load I run it in a terminal. It's pretty light so doesn't skew results.