Wondering should I bother upgrading my DDR3 RAM?

the_syco

So, I'm in Toronto, and thinking should I upgrade my RAM, or just wait until I build a new PC around May next year? Applying for PR at the moment, and that'll take my spare my funds.

Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

Intel Core i5 4670K @ 3.40GHz 26 °C

8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 665MHz (9-9-9-24)

ASRock Z97 Anniversary (CPUSocket) 26 °C

GN246HL (1920x1080@144Hz)

2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 (MSI)

The RAM that I'm thinking of getting would be the following;
CAD$180 http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=24_311_312_1239&item_id=047597

Would be mainly playing ARMA3, and PUBG.

K.O.Kiki

If you can't afford it twice over, do not buy.

Also, you don't need 32Gb RAM for gaming; 8Gb is plenty.
At best I'd recommend to buy a better CPU cooler & overclock the CPU itself.

the_syco

If I OC the CPU, it'd be for the winter months only (Nov-March). Outside temps hit 25-30 easily enough during the summer, and as I'm currently in an attic room, it would still be around the 15-20 mark at times even with aircon!

TerrorFirmer

You have 1333mhz ram which is pretty slow by modern standards, but really what needs more urgent upgrading is your graphics card.

Canis Lupus

My air cooled (Coolermaster Hyper 212x or some variant) i5 3570 is overclocked to 4.4ghz and I live in Brisbane. With Prime95 running it hits around the high 70s with no aircon and high 60s low 70s in just normal gaming situations. I doubt you need to worry too much about your cpu temps in Canada summer or not.

I'd overclock as best I could and invest in a new gfx card although I'm not expert in this upgrading malarky anymore.

challengemaster

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

Also, you don't need 32Gb RAM for gaming; 8Gb is plenty.

Unless you're playing PUBG... its horribly optimised but FPS are severely limited by only having 8gb of RAM.

TerrorFirmer

challengemaster wrote: »

Unless you're playing PUBG... its horribly optimised but FPS are severely limited by only having 8gb of RAM.

I've heard that used a few times but never had any issues myself. I think it's one of those games, at least it used to be, where the longer you played the more ram it seemed to eat up.

But a GTX760 is definitely the bigger obstacle to performance in this case!

PUBG is not CPU heavy at all so no overclocking needed in this case either.

challengemaster

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

PUBG is not CPU heavy at all so no overclocking needed in this case either.

Well.. only at the minute becuase it can't take advantage of proper CPU usage :pac:

Benchmarks showed it was only using 24% of Ryzen 1800 but maxed out a 1080Ti to the point it was being CPU bottlenecked.

TerrorFirmer

A CPU bottleneck though is when the CPU can't keep pace with the GPU. That doesn't happen in PUBG. You can get 100+ fps with an i3......but it's impossible to reach that FPS on anything other than the strongest graphics card.

the_syco

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

You have 1333mhz ram which is pretty slow by modern standards, but really what needs more urgent upgrading is your graphics card.

Yup. It's about 3 or 4 years old at this stage. Shall look at upgrading it in the new year.

challengemaster

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

A CPU bottleneck though is when the CPU can't keep pace with the GPU. That doesn't happen in PUBG. You can get 100+ fps with an i3......but it's impossible to reach that FPS on anything other than the strongest graphics card.

I know - the game is so badly programmed it can't utilise the CPU power. Take a look at the benchmark results here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEz0ysFjzGU

Doesn't matter if its an i5-8400 or an 8700K, same FPS. It's essentially a coding based CPU bottleneck.

TerrorFirmer

challengemaster wrote: »

I know - the game is so badly programmed it can't utilise the CPU power. Take a look at the benchmark results here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEz0ysFjzGU

Doesn't matter if its an i5-8400 or an 8700K, same FPS. It's essentially a coding based CPU bottleneck.

I don't follow the logic. I don't mean that in a condescending way, I just don't! Plenty of AAA games are GPU dependent and light on CPU.

All that video shows is that PUBG relies heavily on IPC and doesn't show any benefit beyond quad core.

EG look at the G4560, a dual core, quad threaded CPU but it falls down badly compared to the Coffee Lake i3 which is quad core, quad thread (same as skylake i5)

PUBG does prefer quad cores, and prefers Intel due to the higher IPC. There Intel>AMD for this game, regardless of core count.

Could it be optimised better regards CPU? Probably. But as it is, it's just not very CPU intensive.

But it's not unique. The vast majority of AAA games don't fully utilize CPU power because it's not needed.

Don't know how the game engine works but it's badly optimised, whatever way it does work it hammers GPUs. But it's not CPU bound.

Doesn't matter if its an i5-8400 or an 8700K, same FPS. It's essentially a coding based CPU bottleneck.

Incidentally these are both six core high-end CPUs. I would not expect to see much perceivable difference between them in virtually any game, not just PUBG.

A theoretical bottleneck simply because there's an imposed ceiling of 100-120fps (or whatever) without 100% CPU usage does not make it a CPU bottleneck.

It only becomes a CPU bottleneck when the GPU is being restricted by the ceiling of the CPU - this does not happen in PUBG unless you have a low end processor like a 2nd gen i3, modern Pentium or AMD A10 or X4, etc.