Performance decreases with approximately 8GB plus 16GB of memory usage.
Performance decreases with approximately 8GB plus 16GB of memory usage.
I recently bought a laptop with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600H and 8GB 3200Mhz RAM by default. Now I plan to increase it to 24GB (adding 16GB of 3200Mhz RAM). My system runs Ubuntu as the operating system, and I expect to use around 12 Firefox tabs, three Windows VMs, and Docker. I’m concerned whether upgrading would cause a significant performance drop compared to the current 8GB + 8GB setup. Would it be better to stick with 8GB+8GB or go for 8GB+16GB? I’d like to know if the bottleneck would stay under 5%.
Based on your activities, you might not see a performance decrease if you go beyond 16GB of RAM because the remaining 8GB will operate in single-channel mode. This is still preferable to 1x8GB.
The present setup is 1x 8GB, so adding 8 or 16GB won’t make it worse. Combining 8 with 8 might offer better optimization, but if you want more than 16GB, getting a 16GB drive would suffice.
Thanks for the assistance, but I'm moving forward with (8+16)GB next.
I’d consider adding another 16GB module, aiming for a total of 28GB. As for the performance comparison, I’m curious about how much faster an 8+16GB setup would be versus a 12+12GB configuration—just trying to understand the difference.
I don't understand how to put this clearly... Essentially, with just one stick of RAM you're operating in Single Channel mode, which reduces performance compared to Dual Channel. Adding another stick provides double the bandwidth, so performance should improve significantly—especially for CPU-heavy tasks that also require a lot of memory. If you have two sticks but one has more memory than the other, you'll switch to Dual Channel until your usage hits the Dual Channel limit, after which the remaining RAM runs in Single Channel mode and performance drops accordingly. The total amount of RAM doesn't affect performance as long as it doesn't exceed what you have; however, a 2x4GB setup will outperform a 1x8GB setup when both are within your available capacity.