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.
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?
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
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.