Discussing the Ram Upgrade
Discussing the Ram Upgrade
Good afternoon, your question about the PC setup is clear. You're using a configuration with two 8GB Corsair Vengeance Pro cards, an MSI B550 gaming motherboard, Ryzen 5 5600X, a separate PCIe Wi-Fi card supporting Wi-Fi 6, and an RTX 3070 Ti. All drivers are up to date. While gaming performance is solid at over 300 FPS with stable 20ms, your online experience lags—especially on YouTube and Discord. You mentioned seeing similar issues on Reddit, wondering if it's RAM or network problems. Given your location in Australia on NBN, it’s likely the internet speed is the main factor. Consider checking your connection speed and possibly upgrading to a faster plan if needed.
The main challenge is bandwidth, not latency. Ping isn't a concern here. 16 GB is likely sufficient for most activities and more than enough for YouTube.
It means you're limited to 360p quality and can't choose a higher resolution option.
I can handle up to 4k resolution (or whatever the uploader specified) but it still buffers and loading other tabs becomes slow. I even ran a speed test and it showed normal performance, so the issue isn’t just my connection.
Does YT lag only during gaming sessions or consistently? How much memory is your browser consuming? If you're utilizing all 16GB of RAM, performance will degrade, but adding more RAM won't help.
I'ma be honest, I have 2 systems, 1 with 16gig the other with 32gigs, yes there's a slight "overhead" with 32, but in almost all situations it's not really a noticable difference at all, I often have yt running in the background and don't even notice (99% of the time)! And yeah, I agree the resolution thing is hardly a ram issue more like bandwidth, maybe it's low to begin with, maybe there's another problem with the computer, because online pew pew games should hardly use bandwidth (yt does tho, obviously)
I believe your expectations about computers are a bit off. Maybe reducing the resolution to 1080p would help. Upgrading your RAM to around 128GB could also make a difference, but the real bottleneck might still be the GPU or CPU. Windows multitasking does have some downsides that you need to be aware of and manage effectively.
Consider using numerical values for "fine and fast." Check the video stats to see speed and buffer details. ~Note: A strong local connection doesn't guarantee fast YT server performance.
Probably a RAM problem, unless as @PDifolco said you're running low on memory. My Firefox uses around 1700-1800MB during random 4K videos, which is under 2GB. To fix buffering or stuttering on YouTube, try turning on or off Hardware Acceleration and check if it helps. Also, confirm your PC setup is correct—especially drivers for your chipset or network if you built it yourself.