We’re having a reshuffle of hardware, my partner is going to get a new (second hand) laptop for developer work, and I’ll get their old one which is an 8 year old HP with an i5 (they had an i7 one, until a drink accident warranted a cheap replacement at short notice).
It’s got 16Gb of ram stuffed into it, which is a mix of different clock speeds. Since I don’t need to compile anything, is it better to have the higher clock speed, or more memory?
It’ll be running some vanilla distro from an SSD, and I’ll be using it for quite mundane activities - emulating 16-bit games, some photo manipulation with Gimp, and looking at porn.
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I have literally never felt the impact of slower RAM speed and I’ve been building PC’s for 30+ years. In every case, adding more was a boost, even if it wasn’t “needed”. Memory timings make a tiny difference to FPS in a game, or might slightly slow down rendering by a tiny fraction, but the increased performance of reduced swapping and other improvements it brings will definitely help out.
Stick with 16.
I’m not really doing anything where FPS is an issue, the only slowdown I notice at the moment with 4GB of ram is that it swaps out when I’m doing something sticky in Gimp … though reducing swap use can only be good for my SSD
Get the 16
Err, I already have the 16, it’s just mismatched, hence the post
Keep the 16
16GiB, the modern web is starting to be quite rough on 8GiB. Unless you have a very performance sensitive application, I don’t think the timings matter that much.
The reason I wasn’t sure is that I have 4GB in my 12 year old Thinkpad, and it seems to do ok most of the time, lol
But I know everythings just going to get heavier and less optimised, so the more the merrier … thank you
From JS? Wonder if there is a way to force it to not be such. Only application I know runs horribly is Mastodon.
RAM speed makes a difference for local LLM inference. Not sure what else.
If you already have enough RAM, adding more does nothing. In this case, increased RAM speed, which still does almost nothing, is preferable.
But going forward, my money is always on RAM needs increasing. The RAM that’s enough today probably won’t be enough in a few years. That alone is enough reason for me to choose the higher capacity option.
The final option is to sell the excess RAM, and buy a yacht. Or put the money in a savings account and wait for prices to come back down, at least below what you sold it for. Beware that predictions on this are absolutely all over the board, so you’d be taking a risk. But DDR4 is already pretty old, and will disappear soon enough anyway.
I think this is DDR3, so not exactly yacht money
More memory.
The clock speed might result in a very small performance different under specific workloads. 8GB will result in performance issues basically everywhere with modern apps and websites.
Well, I’m currently using a 12 year old Thinkpad with 4GB of ram without problems, so I’m not entirely swayed about 8GB not being enough
Linux is pretty efficient with RAM, 8 GB will probably allow you do do most things fine, especially one or two at a time, but 16GB allows for more multitasking, faster ram only gives you a small performance boost in certain niche scenarios.
I’d wager most of the time, 16GB allowing you to keep 2x as much info cached in memory will be a bigger performance boost on average than having a faster clock.
Under your described use case it probably won’t make a huge difference unless you’re editing massive photos or watching several porn streams at the same time.
I’d stick with 16GB unless you encounter any instability from having mixed spec RAM, at which point I would pull one to see if that solves anything.
My laptop has 8GB and Linux and its really not enough to actually do much IMO, it’s fine if it’s just a single browser open with a few tabs though.
Thanks, yeah I’m not doing anything strenuous. Just having more than the 4GB in my current machine will make the biggest difference.
The mismatched ram has been working ok for several months for my partner, and they push the machine pretty hard.
Even slow RAM is a thousand times faster than swap. Search for “memory hierarchy” for a better idea of why.
Yeah, I just wasn’t sure if Linux would need any swap for the sort of things I’m doing if there was 8Gb available.
I do notice the swapping on my current machine when I’m fiddling with photos, but that has 4Gb and otherwise works quite nicely
I have never heard of anyone complaining about ‘slow RAM’. On the other hand, I’ve heard of countless dreads on lack of RAM.
Seriously tho, can anybody actually perceive that speed difference?
No, RAM speed has almost no real-world non-benchmark impacts outside of extreme overclocking. In basically every case where you would start to see the difference, just adding more RAM will make a bigger one.
Yeah, I just wasn’t sure if Linux would want more than 8GB for the stuff I’m doing. There’s a 20%ish difference in clock speed, though I know that doesn’t necessarily line up with a speed difference there would be some
I hat are you doing? I put an ollllllld dell micro on Linux mint, pretty sure that’d be 8gb at ddr3 (maybe ddr4, not sure) and it handles web and video well enough
No graphics card so it has a little screen tearing on fast changing scenes but interestingly it couldn’t even handle videos until I swapped to Linux. On windows it’d play the audio but the video would freeze.
I put what I’ll be using it for in the post, at the moment I’m using 4GB without any problems most of the time
If you run any unoptimized apps… ahem… steam, or any electron app, memory leaks eventually crash the system. For me anyway, with 8 GB.
I had to make a custom solution which quits steam every time the computer goes to standby.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/196/
The more messy programs get, the less I feel like using them … I don’t intend on using Steam or anything that uses Electron but I’ll bear your comment in mind in the future
My gaming PC survived from 2021 to 2026 without “overclocked” RAM because the BIOS would just error out in the POST when I enabled DOCP to boost it from 2600 to 3200 MHz.
A Bios update this spring finally solved it. It was a nice little performance boost, but not that much as I expected. So I guess you’re fine with slower RAM.
That decides it, then!
Thanks for the example from real world use
Even if you never hit the 8gb ceiling, having some room is not bad. That’s because how operating systems work. The less free RAM you have, the more of the RAM are parked outside into files, for parts of the RAM the system and applications thinks it is not crucial to the performance and not used in a while. Emulating 16 bit games won’t require much RAM. Editing images will require lot of RAM and benefits from fast RAM the most (out of the activities you described). Browsers require lot of RAM too, but does not need fast RAM.
Without any benchmarks and real world testing, overall in doubt, 16gb is a better choice than 8gb on modern operating systems and activities, unless you know for a fact that the 8gb are not limiting and you benefit from the speed bump in very certain applications. If you can, why not remove the additional 8gb to have consistent set with higher clock speeds and test it yourself for a day or so and see how it works out?
