Upgrading RAM - Should I?

Hello everyone. I just had a thought of upgrading the RAM in my M17X R4 from 8 GB to 16. The question I have is, why should I do this? Will I see better FPS in games? Will I notice any difference at all? Is it worth it, in other words.

I'm using my laptop to encode HD movies as well as play games, so if I can get a performance boost in that area I will go for it. Can you guys share your thoughts with upgrading the RAM?

And as a side note, if you had some money to spend, how would you guys upgrade your Alienware laptops? I already have a 7970m which works well enough, and an i7 3630qm processor. What would be a viable option for upgrading it? I'm open to new ideas.

Thanks for reading!

 

No, 8GB is enough for gaming, just launch a game, switch back to windows and check ressource, you'll notice that you have plenty memory free

If you want to play virtual machines, 8GB is not enough.

 

Unless you are doing a lot of multitasking, or virtual machines, you probably won't notice it.

If you have SSD, and no real issues, your best might be saving your money for when you need or want to replace the whole laptop.

 

RAM allows you to do stuff, and the more you have, the more you can do. The amount of memory you have does not have any direct impact on gaming performance, the frequency of which it is running, may. For example: upgrading from 1600MHz to 2133MHz would help performance wise.

Open the task manager the next time you're using your computer to see how much RAM you use. It you are reaching above 6GB, then getting 16GB may be a good idea.

 

Thanks for the helpful responses.

Say I upgrade the RAM to a higher frequency. Will I get any increased FPS in games? What type of performance increase are we talking about here? I'm not even sure what MHZ my RAM is, how can I check it? That might seem like a good move to make to upgrade my performance a bit, but I'll have to research it more.

Here's what I'm currently looking at. Should I pull the trigger?

https://www.google.com/shopping/pro...Sx4APk-oHQDw&ved=0CKcBEPMCMAQ&prds=scoring:tp

 

No, don't buy those. They are for desktops. You will want to buy Kingston HyperX Notebook Memory at 2133Mhz (204 pin).

 

Ooh, thanks for the heads up.

I'm only at about 3.5 GB of RAM usage. When I'm encoding videos it goes up to around 5 or so. I did notice that I can't encode a video and play a game at the same time, though. I get a pretty huge FPS hit when I do that. So really, the only improvement I'm going to see is the ability to encode a video while playing a game. Not sure if that's worth upgrading for, really.

 

Encoding video is either a huge CPU cycle hog or a huge GPU cycle hog depending on which encoder you are using, the FPS drop is mainly due to that and has little to do with RAM quantity.

 

Don't buy ram modules for gaming, 8GB is enough even faster modules has no impact for gaming, as it's using the vmemory from graphic card...

What you can buy is a very good laptop cooler for cooling down the laptop while gaming

 

Yep, it's definitely CPU. Maybe I should upgrade my CPU instead

 

You have an SSD? They will increase performance of loading and day to day responsiveness of computer. One of the most noticeable speed increases you can do, doesn't have a massive impact on encoding or gameplay unless there is a bottleneck on loading.

 

Yes, I have an SSD. I love it. Very quick loading times and Windows starts in just a few seconds. Lovely device.