Do RAM and SSD upgrades make a difference in gaming (PLEASE ANSWER)

Hi guys,

Basically I was wondering whether an upgrade to 6GB RAM (from 4GB) would make a difference in playing games such as crysis and battlefield 3?

and a further question, would an SSD install into the DVD drive bay make a difference?

What about combining the 2, how much difference would that make?

Thanks in advance for your replies

Current System Specs: Dell XPS 15: Intel Core i5-2510m @ 2.30Ghz (2.90Ghz Turbo), 4GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GT 525M 1GB, 500GB HDD (5,400 I think)

 

4GB is fine for now.
an SSD would make a big difference in general use (Windows boot, opening applications, installing applications, etc.)
For gaming specific:
Game would boot faster and loading levels ingame should be quite a bit faster. But if your question is that you can get a higher FPS than the answer is no.

If you experience low framerates when gaming it will be due your GT525M, which is not the fastest around

 

some games stream textures from the hard drive, but it's not going to make a big difference in your case. Your GPU is basically the culprit, as noted above.

 

If I were you I would go for a very fast SSD drive, not necessarily very large in size, too keep your favorite games install and possibly your OS.

Running games off an SSD drastically reduces loading times, and in certain games that constantly load textures and the world around you like Skyrim, Fallout 3, Oblivion you will get smoother gameplay, especially when using high resolution Texture mods.

I would save the money from buying more RAM (as more RAM will not give you a real gaming increase unless you are running out of Memory, which can be easily solved by creating a fast read/write paging file on the SSD) to buy a faster SSD with the best write/read rates possible within your budget.

 

First of all thank you for all replies.

It seems the general consensus is that the extra RAM will not make a difference.

@andros_forever : I like the idea of a small and fast SSD for OS and games. Am I right in assuming I can use a hard drive caddy in my DVD drive for the install?

And also would I require a copy of Window 7 OS as my laptop came preinstalled? (With a bunch of crapware I may add)

 

Given the graphics card, the SSD isn't going to make a significant difference. It could help in some games with loading times or streaming textures, but since you have a relatively light graphics muscle, you'll be playing these games with lower texture quality anyway, and it's just not going to make a serious impact.

It could certainly improve overall operating system performance, though, if you install your OS on it.

 

You can reuse the included license key. For installation you can either download an unaltered iso file or use the recovery partition found on your HDD.

 

SSD = best pc upgrade, we game in a fraction of our time, but mostly we do our business on the web / OS.. SSD increases your speed a lot (not in games though, except for loading times, which is still great if you are playing games like witcher 2) but in OS, when MATLAB gets ready in 1 second, you are like, WOW..

still I would NOT suggest you to get the fastest SSD (if you are not an expert who knows what he is doing, dangerous...), get the most reliable SSD = Intel/Samsung/Crucial.. otherwise you will be close friends with BSOD

 

I loaded shogun total war 2 onto my SSD and i frankly noticed 0 difference in load times, maybe it has to do with the fact that i had to do it using a hard link to my steam apps folder maybe its just not the big of a difference but im not sure. I use the 320 intel SSD.

 

Load times are a bit faster with SSD but if your GPU is slow and vRAM is only DDR3 it won't matter much. RAM won't matter much either unless you're nearing your limit, although more RAM can't hurt. Running dual channel (i.e. two sticks of RAM vs just one) will improve general performance but not necessarily gaming performance.

 

If you use high res texture mods or texture packs, or games with partially resident textures (like RAGE), I've noticed the SSD improves the frame rate a bit. Also as others mentioned above, the load times are much faster, which for me makes a huge difference for any game where you die and reload frequently.

Lots of RAM provides absolutely no improvement for any game I've ever played. If you have 6-8GB, that should be more than enough to run your game and Steam client or whatever you have running in the background.

 

personally I've never seen a game that takes any more than 2.77GB of ram, so even 3GB is good enough! what matters is the ram timing and the frequency itself, I gained 8 FPS more when upgraded to a faster corsair dominator RAMS!

SSD is a major improvement in every aspect! except the FPS!

 

Are you certain about this?

It was my understanding faster RAM makes almost no difference, especially since the bottleneck for us laptop gamers is usually either the GPU or CPU.

 

I was comparing the "cheap" pre-installed generic rams. They usually bottleneck everything. Especially when any other high end component is installed, also from 800mhz to 1066 with superior timings made the difference for me!

 

Faster RAM won't matter for a dedicated GPU. It will for integrated GPU.

 

This is exactly true.

A GPU upgrade (if possible) is your best bet for gaming performance increase. That said, I will never go back to an HDD as my OS partition, ever, whether it be a laptop or a desktop. The improvements an SSD bring to the entire system are something you really shouldn't deprive yourself of.

Hello 12 second boot time!

 

I can't even remember the last time I shutdown or booted my machine...maybe two or three weeks ago when I went on vacation. While my machine boots up, that's the perfect time for me to visit the bathroom or get a beer or coffee.

I'm old school. Load times and boot-ups don't affect me all that much (unless it drastically changes from the norm...ie, 24 sec to 40...then something's wrong). While I'm intrigued by SSD technology, I'm currently fine with the RAID0 HDD setup I have. I'm in the "ignorance is bliss" world, I guess, but I'm fine with it. Maybe in a year or so, I'll bite the bullet and get a 512GB SSD, but I'm big on having at least 1TB of drive space. Supposedly, I can keep my RAID0 HDD setup and get an SSD by removing my DVD drive and putting ond of the HDDs there...that's rather drastic for me. And, I do occasionally use the DVD drive, but there's a solution to that: putting the removed DVD drive into an external enclosure.

For me, all I want to do is game. I don't necessarily want or need to have the latest/greatest hardware in a system. Speed isn't always the key to enjoyment (at least for some). And since my main gaming focus is FPS, upgrading to SSD won't give me any additional advantage in gameplay, so I guess I'm good with what I have.

 

I've had an SSD for a while now but never tried installing a bootable OS on it, but yesterday I felt like taking the venture.

I installed Windows 7 on it and booted off the SSD (leaving my HDD and my main OS installation intact).

The boot time was phenomenal and Windows started in a few seconds. My Windows Index score for HDD performance went up from 5.9/7.9 to 7.5/7.9 and it was very noticeable when opening folders and web browsing with Firefox. Now I booted off my HDD because I have all my installations and Firefox preferences set up here.

Gaming was about the same, with Skyrim booting as fast as always off my SSD and with little to no loading times. And Skyrim is one of those few games that actually DO benefit gameplay wise from being installed on an SSD, especially in outside areas where the world is constantly being loaded. Makes gameplay much smoother. Other games that preload worlds don't get that benefit of an SSD and are fine installed on an HDD.

Only thing keeping me from transfering permanently to my SSD OS is losing all my application/game installations and registry information, as well as my Firefox browsing history/bookmarks etc that I have set up over the years.

Wonder if anyone knows of a way that I could transfer all those registry/application and game installations and possibly all the shortcuts I have set up from my HDD Windows 7 installation to my SSD Windows 7 installation? I'd like to keep my applications and games installed on the HDD as my SSD is only 64 gigs. Between the 20 gig OS, Firefox, Skyrim and maybe another couple of games I want nothing else installed on the SSD, maintaining everything else installed on the HDD.

 

As I see here people told a lot true about SSD and games but not everything about RAM and Games.

I am not going to tell theory of what is bottleneck and other reasons that should stop anyone to buy more RAM for gaming performance. I am going to tell about practice:

If you have 4 GB of RAM then about a half is already used for your OS. Am I right? So basically your games could use more than you have.
I had 6GB of RAM. And my gpu was bad. 330m. But I got about 4 fps+ in FarCry 2 when I went from 6 to 8Gb. And it is not including that all game went smoother. I assume it was because 8 GB uses dual mode while 6GB use 4GB in dual mode and 2Gb in single mode. Flex mode called all these.

If you have DDR3 memory then buy 8Gb kit which is cheap like 30$ or so. If you can pay 43$ for RAM then buy Corsair Vengeance 1600 RAM. even if your CPU works on 1333 mode it will use faster timings.

About SSD... buy 64Gb Crucial M4 from eBAY.

 

IMO, if you play a certain type of game where you die and reload frequently, an SSD really enhances the experience by reducing or eliminating the load time.

If you are using Steam, all you need to do is backup any or all of your games to external drive, then install Steam on the SSD and restore the backup.