Old Gamer Memory Upgrade Worth It?

[rockit00]

Coming from SSHD's, every time I look at SSD's I get a headache! My Z97 now takes five minutes to fully boot to Windows 10. My Z390 boots to Windows 10/11 in two minutes flat which is acceptable for the 2TB SSHD's installed. I guess I'll focus on a couple of SSD's for the Z97 first and worry about memory upgrade later if needed. I've got to sort through a bunch of SSD types and pick the best for Haswell era hardware. There's a lot of info out there now days compared to 2014. With a fresh bottle of aspirin, SSD 101 here I come. No Pain, No Gain.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Coming from SSHD's, every time I look at SSD's I get a headache! My Z97 now takes five minutes to fully boot to Windows 10. My Z390 boots to Windows 10/11 in two minutes flat which is acceptable for the 2TB SSHD's installed. I guess I'll focus on a couple of SSD's for the Z97 first and worry about memory upgrade later if needed. I've got to sort through a bunch of SSD types and pick the best for Haswell era hardware. There's a lot of info out there now days compared to 2014. With a fresh bottle of aspirin, SSD 101 here I come. No Pain, No Gain.

Any NVMe drive will work, it's a Gen 3 interface. No need to sweat over DRAM either, it's just being overzealous. You'll do fine with quite literally any Gen 3 drive, just buy the highest capacity one you can afford from a reputable brand (WD, SanDisk, ADATA/XPG, Kingston, etc)

 

[Toothless]

PCI 3.0 NVME in a PCI slot with an adapter would work. Ran a 970 EVO in my 4790k for years just fine and it's still quick enough on the current SATA SSD. Why you're so against using an SSD for a boot drive is beyond me and you're just shooting yourself in the foot at this point.

It's really not rocket science.

 

[AusWolf]

I'm trying to run a benchmark in Avatar: FoP that I installed on a HDD for science, but instead, I've just been sitting here, looking at the loading screen for the last 20 or so minutes. HDD gaming is definitely not recommended.

 

[rockit00]

PCI 3.0 NVME in a PCI slot with an adapter would work. Ran a 970 EVO in my 4790k for years just fine and it's still quick enough on the current SATA SSD. Why you're so against using an SSD for a boot drive is beyond me and you're just shooting yourself in the foot at this point.

It's really not rocket science.

I just read about that adapter trick at the MSI forums yesterday. I don't have a problem with using an SSD for a boot drive. I used to run two nearly identical rigs until around 2016. I also had a MSI Z87-G45 Gaming build with the 4790k. I had a Sapphire HD 6950 Toxic 2GB in the Z97 and the Z87. I decided to sell the Z87, the 4790k and the Toxics and I installed the Z87 SSHD and 8GB ( 2x4 ) memory into the Z97 build for a dual boot rig. I upped the GPU to a R9 380 X. Just before the crypto craze I upped the GPU to a RX 580 8GB. I stopped building and upgrading until Dec 2024. Today it appears that brand new 1TB 2.5" SSD's are similarly priced compared to the brand new 1TB 2.5" Firecuda SSHD's. I'm a little concerned about SSD degradation compared to my current SSHD's and the way I use them. I do a lot of copying and erasing with SSHD's so I'll have to unlearn some unhealthy habits when I move to SSD's. I guess time will tell.

 

[nomdeplume]

I don't have a problem with using an SSD for a boot drive.

Were this me, which it is not.

I'd be digging out the manual from my motherboard to settle how much of an afterthought SSD was. Compared to what appears to be a ready made Optane M.2x2 slot (dual mode?). I'd also be looking at BIOS release notes for clues about SATA SSD support (M.2 & 2.5").

I've upgraded a z390 board a year ago from 16 to 32GB. This was with a 9900k. Besides the occasional game pushing 15GB ram usage, it didn't bring much improvement to the table. It's nice to look at on your screen, but for gaming you won't notice a difference.

This has been my experience also. TBH any modern browser makes you work really hard to crash RAM. +200 tabs and command line instructions shutting off numerous internal functions plus constantly clicking around to actively load 10's of pages.

I also somewhat agree with Lex to max everything out and ride high in ways that would've been nearly inconceivable at launch.

 

[lexluthermiester]

How many webpages do you plan on opening at once using Chrome? That may dictate the amount you need.

You mean FireFox? Because eff chrome.

4x8GB DDR3 kits are cheap enough, and if you can find one with a good XMP speeds, why not?

This! Seriously, it's better to have more than is needed than not to have enough, even for a spare system.

 

[DirtyDingusMcgee]

You could upgrade the ram and then use said extra memory as ram cache for system drive. Primocache works very well.

 

[Princess Garnet]

Keep in mind, SSHD's are faster than HDD's. The SSD side improves performance dramatically. That performance is fine for system that isn't their primary system.

Sometimes. The phrase "things are only as slow as the slowest link in the chain" comes to mind. An SSHD is a hybrid between an HDD and SSD, and unless all of the Windows and application data fetched during boot is on the SSD portion (and this is presuming the SSHD can actually "store" it there as opposed to using the NAND portion entirely as cache), then it might not have (much) faster performance here. The thread starter mentioned having a 1 TB SSHD, and I recall that most SSHDs of around that size had pretty small NAND sizes of like 8 GB. I don't know what exact model it is so I can't say.

In any case, I don't see any indication of "I'm using all of my RAM" so my first guess is that bumping 16 GB to 32 GB won't help boot times (or anything), but the "slow boot" mentioned would have me looking at either the SSHD, an overloaded startup Windows install, and/or just the older 12 year old platform (since they mention the Coffee Lake platform is slightly faster and also uses an SSHD). I had an older Core 2 PC and moving from an HDD to an SSD was an unbelievable improvement in startup and overall responsiveness even on that. Even if the Haswell system is a dozen years old, it's still fast enough that saddling it with an HDD as the boot drive will vastly slow its startup and general responsiveness.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Sometimes. The phrase "things are only as slow as the slowest link in the chain" comes to mind.

As someone who owned and used a 750GB 7200RPM SSHD, I can share from personal experience that these types of drives perform very well in most situations, very SSD like most of the time.

An SSHD is a hybrid between an HDD and SSD

Are you kidding? Did you honestly think you needed to say that? Come on now.

and unless all of the Windows and application data fetched during boot is on the SSD portion (and this is presuming the SSHD can actually "store" it there as opposed to using the NAND portion entirely as cache), then it might not have (much) faster performance here. The thread starter mentioned having a 1 TB SSHD, and I recall that most SSHDs of around that size had pretty small NAND sizes of like 8 GB. I don't know what exact model it is so I can't say.

You clearly don't understand how they actually work. Try to remember, 8GB is enough space to store an ENTIRE Windows 11 install, WITH drivers. 8GB is more than enough to cache the most frequently used sectors of a drive, which is what they do. So unless they(the OP) NEEDS the entire drive to perform like an SSD, their SSHD will continue to do just fine as is.

In any case, I don't see any indication of "I'm using all of my RAM" so my first guess is that bumping 16 GB to 32 GB won't help boot times (or anything), but the "slow boot" mentioned would have me looking at either the SSHD, an overloaded startup Windows install, and/or just the older 12 year old platform (since they mention the Coffee Lake platform is slightly faster and also uses an SSHD). I had an older Core 2 PC and moving from an HDD to an SSD was an unbelievable improvement in startup and overall responsiveness even on that. Even if the Haswell system is a dozen years old, it's still fast enough that saddling it with an HDD as the boot drive will vastly slow its startup and general responsiveness.

Again, spoken like someone with no real-world experience with an SSHD. Here's an idea, get on Ebay and find yourself a 750GB or 1TB SSHD, buy it and try it out. Then come back and lecture us again on how well they work.

 

[rockit00]

I mostly have used Seagate SSHD's since the Momentus XT 750GB drives appeared. The Z97/Z87 drives are the Seagate 1TB 7200RPM drives with 8GB NAND. According to Hardware Monitor I currently have 36296 power on hours and 9240 power cycles on these drives! I like their performance compared to HDD's. They are now 130GB short of full capacity and loaded with lots of games, movies and fond memories. Nostalgia aside, I'm getting that old upgrade itch back now that the 2020 crypto-mania has settled down. I have used one SSD for a HP Spectre XT ultrabook repair a while back. It was a LiteON 256GB drive and that is the only SSD I've used. SSHD's are nothing to sneeze at but SSD's are becoming more appealing every day!

 

[lexluthermiester]

SSD's are becoming more appealing every day!

And that's fair. You can get a quality 1TB SSD for about $70 these days, less if you go with a DRAMless drive.

 

[Prime2515102]

Doesn't sound like you're doing anything to come close to using 16GB, are you? If not, upgrading to 32GB is kinda pointless IMO.

I wanted to go "future proof" and got 32GB in an i7-7700k system (that did 5Ghz without a hickup) and I've never touched 16GB.

I haven't had a problem with recent games unless I've tried to run 4k (with an nvidia 1080). I tend to want to run everything on max though. I'll reduce resolution before I'll turn visual settings down. 1440p is a compromise that I'm not willing to visit.

I haven't run any usable benchmarks lately. When I say "usable" I mean my completely subjective impression of how a game feels. I can't get that from a benchmark.

At any rate, I exceeded the tech with the amount of memory I built this system with. The same applies to older games that I wanted to run smooth at the time. Graphics memory is way more important.

 

[Marcus L]

You clearly don't understand how they actually work. Try to remember, 8GB is enough space to store an ENTIRE Windows 11 install, WITH drivers. 8GB is more than enough to cache the most frequently used sectors of a drive, which is what they do. So unless they(the OP) NEEDS the entire drive to perform like an SSD, their SSHD will continue to do just fine as is.

But in the OP's case his system is taking 5 mins just to load into Windows, whether that's to do with the capacity he has the drive at or other things that are being cached, even a SATA SSD as a boot drive would be a big improvement and my suggestion over 32GB RAM

 

[phill]

Lol. It's not related to RAM that your pc is slower, just an older system with weaker st etc. Adding more RAM from 16 to 32 won't magically make your 4 GB Windows install boot faster.

I thought bigger numbers for us blokes make all the difference so surely it must be twice as good?!?!?

Scanning over the replies, I can agree though with the SSD, definitely get one of those suckers in there.. They bring out a whole new experience.. Heck you could even use a PCIe adaptor card and get a cheap NVME drive in there if you wished... They aren't mega money at all and you might not need TB's of space either... Might be worth a thought or look maybe

 

[Macro Device]

Keep in mind, SSHD's are faster than HDD's. The SSD side improves performance dramatically.

As a former SSHD user I can assure you this idea stinks. The difference between an SSHD and HDD is barely significant. SSDs are dirt cheap and will improve everything for OP a lot. More RAM? I use my PC for AAA gaming and heavy stuff like game development so me having more than 16 GB is kinda justified but with his tasks? Seriously? Zero reason to bother.