How much RAM?


My pc says install ram equally.....I have 3gbs of ram=1+1+1. Is it better to use only 2gbs=1+1 or all 3=2+1? I have 4 slots.........Thanks in advance for any input.

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just buy two 4GB chips (of the proper type) and sit them in their proper slots which is basically the one closest to the CPU and i imagine the other will be color coded like that one as my old motherboard was that had four RAM slots in it.

depending on what kind of RAM you got i would just get a 2x4GB for a total of 8GB of RAM. that will be priced decent enough and your PC will run great simply because 8GB is more than enough for most uses. you will notice the difference from 3GB to 8GB in your overall system responsiveness especially if you have a fair amount of programs loaded up in general. i figure i would not go less than 4GB on a half way decent modern computer at the least although 8GB is best simply because with that much RAM your system will never be slow for general use due to lack of RAM.

i got DDR3 RAM in my computer as if you got old DDR ram that stuff is just too expensive for what you get and you would be better off upgrading the motherboard/cpu/RAM etc. taking a quick look on newegg's website, assuming you are in the USA, you get get 8GB of DDR3 RAM (2x4GB) for around $55-60, give or take.

but obviously... 2GB of RAM is going to run noticeably worse than having 3GB of RAM simply because 3GB is already low already but losing 1/3rd of your RAM is going to take a decent general performance hit as fairly ancient computers have 2GB of RAM or less and those are limited on what you can run on them otherwise it will be constantly thrashing the hard drive for virtual memory(since when your computer runs out of actual RAM it uses the computers hard drive for RAM which slows everything down quite a bit). as long as you don't have any problems i would not worry about it and keep using the 3GB, but depending on how old your computer is etc i would likely upgrade the RAM.

also, what OS do you have on your computer? ; this is important because 32bit OS's can't allocate more than 4GB of RAM (and i think this includes video card memory to. so for example if you got 3GB of RAM and a 1GB video card on a 32bit OS your pretty much maxed out) as in order to use 8GB you need to make sure you got a 64bit OS.

also, what computer do you have? ; a premade one like Dell or custom built? ; if it's custom built tell me what motherboard you got or if it's pre-built what manufacturer and model of the computer is it? ; that will tell me the info i need to know.

p.s. also, if your PC is not too old getting a SSD drive (along with that 8GB of RAM) would be another big general performance booster as things will load up much faster with a SSD drive and they are priced quite reasonably for a modern drive and should last many years given you won't wear them out from writing data to it as many of the modern ones seem to be rated roughly about 75TB of writes which unless your writing a lot of data to your drive all of the time it will likely easily outlast your computer from that aspect. or look at it this way... if you wrote 40GB of data on the SSD drive per day it would still make at least 5+ years of use and i doubt most people would even come close to averaging 40GB a day of writes to their SSD drive as that's a lot of data to average over that much of a time frame as you would likely be well under that figure which means the drive will likely easily outlast that computer. plus, the drive i got has a 5 year warranty (Samsung 850 EVO 250GB) and i installed mine back in 2015 so it's covered til sometime in 2020. also, if your getting a SSD drive i strongly recommend not getting one smaller than 250GB as those 120GB simply don't give you enough storage space as you don't want to fill those up as i heard it's best on the 250GB SSD's to have at least 50GB or more free at basically all times for everything to continue performing optimally. with 120GB it does not leave much room to store much beyond the OS as those just ain't worth buying for a desktop computer. also, with SSD your basically going to need Windows 7 or newer as Windows XP is not going to cut it.


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