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.
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