Questions Regarding RAM upgrade

Ok I have an Alienware M17x that I bought awhile back. I am unsure what to get for my RAM upgrade. Currently I have 4gigs DDR3 1333(10600) I believe. I was going to upgrade to 8gig now that the price has come down alot. I can buy an 8Gig gskill kit with these specs on new egg for about 50 bucks now. However I see they now offer a 16gig kit from Patriot and Corsair that are these specs on 8gig sticks. My question is how mych difference in gaming and multiasking applications between 4-8gig jump and how much of a diff would 16 gig make. My unit is not an Rx3 its about 2 years old with the T9600 duo core processor dual nvidia gtx260m gpus in sli. I mostly play online games alot like MMOs and FPS's. I am preparing for the SWTOR launch in Dec. and thought as my christmas present to myself I would upgrade my RAM. the 16gig kit is 300 dollars thats 250 bucks more than just bumping to 8gig. I am wondering if any of you think this is worth it though? Or should I just get the 8gig then wait a while like another year for the 8gig sticks to come down in price more and then bump to 16?

 

I would stick with an 8GB kit. If you're on 4GB now and doing ok, the jump to 8GB is going to be a huge jump. With a 16GB kit, you're probably going to wonder what to do with all that extra RAM. Of course, you could create a RAM drive and offload temp files and internet cache to it.

Do you have an SSD? If you don't, that would be a nice use for the extra $250. It would give you one hell of a boost to performance and would pair nicely with the RAM ugprade.

 

If you are looking for ram in terms of gaming, 8gb won't make a difference. In terms of multi-tasking, it really depends what you are planning on doing. If it's just have a lot of firefox tabs open, music, a game, and something else simple 8gb won't really do anything special that 4gb can already do for you (I have 8gb and I have never gone over 3gb). Don't even bother with 16gb you are wasting your money. If you really want the 16gb or need it for some reason video editing/photoshop/vm all open then go to RAM Memory Upgrade: Dell, Mac, Apple, HP, Compaq. USB drives, SSD at Crucial.com and run the scanner to see if your machine can take 16gb or not before splurging on it.

 

I dont have an SSD at this point just the standard 7200rpm sata drives but I am running two of them currently in Raid0. So I think that helps some. If I ever have trouble with my HDDs though I will definately consider going with a SSD. Thanks for the input. I think your likely right for the same money if I was going to spend 300 It would prolly be better to go with an SSD and the 8gig kit. I just wondered if there was anyone that had tried one of the 16gig kits yet? and what their xp was with them