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Yes, it's another PC related question so apologies in advance.

I'm getting a new PC soon and I was planning on taking a couple of the old RAM chips out of my current machine and sticking them in the new one to boost the RAM up to 12GB but doing some reading, it seems that the mobo throttles the RAM speed to whatever the slowest chip is, so adding in slightly older chips may not have the performance increase I want. So I guess there are a few questions I could do with some elucidation upon, should anyone care to answer:

Firstly, is the jump from 8GB to 12GB of RAM worth any potential slowdown caused by using old chips? Bear in mind, I only intend to use the new PC for mid-level gaming, certainly nothing high-end.

The new PC has 8GB DDR4 at 2666MHz. I was going to add 4GB DDR3 at 2138MHz. Would this even make a difference?

Can you even mix and match DDR3 and DDR4 like that?

Is it even worth bothering about or is 8GB plenty?

Can you even mix and match DDR3 and DDR4 like that?

Check if your chip supports Unidimm, Intel only with Skylakes and later. Otherwise probably not. If it does have unidimm, be aware it's designed to support DDR3L and plugging in DDR3 may cause chip damage, since DDR3 draws more voltage than DDR4 and DDR3L.

Is it even worth bothering about or is 8GB plenty?

Yeah you're good at 8 gb. Unless your planning on sectioning off part of the machine indefinitely as a virtual machine.

Most machines these days hardly use more than 8Gb unless you mess around with them (video games and graphics cards might even cap at 8-16 by default). Memory's a good thing to upgrade if that's on the table, but I've 32Gb in my laptop and its pretty pointless for what I use it for (the joys of working of working for an IT company).

8GB of ram should be plenty sufficient for gaming, especially if you do not plan on running new high-end games.
My laptop has 8GB of ram and can run the newest games on high settings without trouble. If you want to boost performance, I'd look at other components (CPU, GPU) first.

Succinct and to the point, cheers all!

Speaking of ram, I have a pretty antiquated set up with an old 7 year old mechanical harddrive, 4GB ram, and an 4th gen i3 cpu. What should I upgrade first? Should I start with ram and increase it to 8gb, and replace the hard drive and the cpu at the same time? My graphics card is still pretty viable I think. Its an old R7 but it seems to work fine.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Speaking of ram, I have a pretty antiquated set up with an old 7 year old mechanical harddrive, 4GB ram, and an i3 4150 cpu. What should I upgrade first? Should I start with ram and increase it to 8gb, and replace the hard drive and the cpu at the same time? My graphics card is still pretty viable I think. Its an old R7 but it seems to work fine.

Double the RAM if possible (and you have an 64 Bit OS) and get a SSD.
RAM are cheap enough to throw away when you upgrade the rest and the SSD can be re-used.

You need a new mainboard for a better CPU, which will then likely need another set of RAM.

A new motherboard? Can't I just get a 4th gen i5 or i7?

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Speaking of ram, I have a pretty antiquated set up with an old 7 year old mechanical harddrive, 4GB ram, and an i3 4150 cpu. What should I upgrade first? Should I start with ram and increase it to 8gb, and replace the hard drive and the cpu at the same time? My graphics card is still pretty viable I think. Its an old R7 but it seems to work fine.

Depends on what you use it for. Mechanical storage is still great for cheap mass storage of normal media. SSDs are great for your OS and your favourite games to cut down on load times. RAM is always welcome, and its generally recommended to have 8GB these days for any serious gaming (closer to 16 now for higher resolutions which are becoming more popular). Without knowing what you tend to use your PC for and what specific GPU you're running, its hard to say if you're bottlenecked on the CPU or GPU, but an older i3 won't be doing you too many favours (though overlocked, that gen could take a beating).

A 50-100$ investment in anyone of the things listed would improve your PC's performance notably. I'd prioritize the storage last, then depending on what you do primarily, pick one of the other upgrades. RAM is fairly cheap for an additional 4GB and super easy to install for a nice boost if you multi-task a lot (or use Chrome, fething RAM hog), while a new CPU can run anywhere from $50-$500 depending on age and quality. You could probably find last gen's i5s for a solid price, or the new Ryzen chips are great deals.

SSD > HDD any time. If you don't have an SSD at this point then I'd recommend upgrading to one. Though the issue with those is the cost vs capacity. If you're storing a load of junk on your system then the cost of a large enough SSD to store it all may be prohibitive (thus why a lot of laptops are sold with a HDD/ SDD, other than you know performance reasons).

RAM's the cheapest thing to upgrade, at least in the amounts we're talking here (don't go searching for how much a 32 GB stick costs. The fun of certain laptops only having 2 slots). However having a load of that's going to do no good if the board can't handle it. SSD's are getting cheaper these days as well. The CPU's maybe where the cost would be, though to be honest for what we're talking here if you need to upgrade the CPU (presumably integrated onto the Motherboard), drive and Memory then you may as well be buying a new system for like £300 with decent specs (and I'm assuming we're talking about a laptop here, in which case screw finding a compatible Motherboard. If its tower then that's easier, but for the cost of parts buying a complete new one - where every part will be an upgrade, just based on technological advances- seems easier than incrementally replacing parts and dealing with a mix of old and new. Budget's the issue I guess).

I think every PC should have an SSD these days. Even if you can't afford a big one, a small one just for running windows and your most common apps will make your PC super fast. Then you can just save the slower & bigger drive for storage

Yeah, budget is a problem. I can't really afford to get completely new parts when I have perfectly functional parts available. I'm not just talking about the mother board; the case and the PSU counts as well, and its a really good PSU. There's reason to pay for a psu when I already have one.

So the SSD is just that good? I guess I'll find one then and put it on the upgrade list.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
So the SSD is just that good? I guess I'll find one then and put it on the upgrade list.

SSD is night and day compared to a mechanical drive. By far the biggest bang for your buck.

What's a good brand for a SSD? In the past hitachis were pretty much kings when it came to their mechanical drive, but they don't exist as a stand alone company.

I'm using Samsung 850 pros in my desktop and VR PC, and 840 EVOS in less demanding machines.

Herzlos wrote:
SSD is night and day compared to a mechanical drive. By far the biggest bang for your buck.

I concur it should be the absolute first upgrade in any machine that does not have one, but before I spent the money I'd make sure my motherboard supported SATA3 and had an AHCI controller. No point in buying a Ferrari if you can'r drive faster than 30mph and I'm not sure it's a given AHCI is available in a motherboard 7 years old.

Yeah Samsung seems to be making the best SSDs but really any name brand should be good enough. I was pretty amazed when I switched to a SSD, windows reboots in like 5 seconds.

I've been planning to build a new PC for a while now, and there's all kinds of huge cases out there that seem like they are just a ton of wasted space for hard drive bays no one will use. Newer motherboards have M.2 slots for basically a SSD that's on a little card/board like RAM, you don't even need cables or anything, just plug it into the motherboard and you're done. Makes me think we're gonna start seeing traditional hard drives going away soon except for people that do video editing or a huge game library and need tons of space. You can get a 1 TB M.2 SSD for under $300, that's more than enough space for regular folks. Still a lot higher than a 1 TB traditional drive, but prices will keep coming down over time.

 Ouze wrote:
I'm using Samsung 850 pros in my desktop and VR PC, and 840 EVOS in less demanding machines.

Herzlos wrote:
SSD is night and day compared to a mechanical drive. By far the biggest bang for your buck.

I concur it should be the absolute first upgrade in any machine that does not have one, but before I spent the money I'd make sure my motherboard supported SATA3 and had an AHCI controller. No point in buying a Ferrari if you can'r drive faster than 30mph and I'm not sure it's a given AHCI is available in a motherboard 7 years old.

Oh, the motherboard is only 2 years old. Its the HD that's a relic. Though with the rate tech is advancing a MB with a 1150 socket and DDR3 ram is probably a relic now too :/
Like, slow down and let me keep up, dammit -_-

Every time a part of my PC dies, I have to replace other bits too, but to the speed of progress. They're sods for that.

SSDs look to be made primarily by RAM manufacturers. So, Kingston and such should (in theory) make good SSDs. Look at the fastest hard drive port on your mobo, and spec based on that. If the motherboard is recent enough, the stick hard drives look good, though I've not researched them yet.
As a side note on RAM vs HDD, when the swap file gets used, it is the hard drive it turns to. So, a fast hard drive should affect a lack of RAM to some extent.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
I'm using Samsung 850 pros in my desktop and VR PC, and 840 EVOS in less demanding machines.

Herzlos wrote:
SSD is night and day compared to a mechanical drive. By far the biggest bang for your buck.

I concur it should be the absolute first upgrade in any machine that does not have one, but before I spent the money I'd make sure my motherboard supported SATA3 and had an AHCI controller. No point in buying a Ferrari if you can'r drive faster than 30mph and I'm not sure it's a given AHCI is available in a motherboard 7 years old.

Oh, the motherboard is only 2 years old. Its the HD that's a relic. Though with the rate tech is advancing a MB with a 1150 socket and DDR3 ram is probably a relic now too :/
Like, slow down and let me keep up, dammit -_-

The plus side is that what was great a few years ago is just "good" now. Meaning that an average machine these days is above and beyond what you need to play an older game on its high settings.

That is unless manufacturers also keep increasing the price on parts..

 Necros wrote:
Yeah Samsung seems to be making the best SSDs but really any name brand should be good enough. I was pretty amazed when I switched to a SSD, windows reboots in like 5 seconds.

I work in IT desktop support. We did a test a few years back when SSDs were first becoming popular. We built 2 identical laptops, only difference was one had an SSD and the other a mechanical drive. Set them up to log in automatically on boot and launch Word and Excel. SSD laptop was done while the other was still showing the Windows 7 splash screen.

Makes a huge difference.

And yeah, I'd second the Samsung 840 Evo / 850.

On the topic of newer RAM, I'm in the process of picking out parts for a new machine, and run into the issue of having little solid idea how well most DDR4 RAM works with Ryzen CPUs and their B350 AM4 boards. From what I've asked and gleaned on the internet, you're going to have to overclock any RAM that you want running at more than base 2133Mhz, and whether or not the board you want supports overclocking the DDR4 RAM you have is a process of roaming the internet looking for confirmation it works, or trying it yourself, potentially having wasted £100 on RAM you can't use properly.

Since most board manufacturers don't update their QVLs after they compile them so it's laughably short on information, and people seem to be saying that various board BIOS updates allow increasingly more brands and makes of DDR4 to be compatible but at the same time break the compatibility of others, I'm at a complete loss in trying to find RAM that is A) Available to buy in the UK, B) Not hideously expensive, and C) Works with the boards I'm looking at--namely the ASRock AB350M Pro4. All I want is two damn paired sticks of 4GB, and was looking at ( https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/BYH48d/corsair-memory-cmk8gx4m2b3000c15 ) before being warned they might or might not work depending on how the machine is feeling, what the weather's like outside, and what I had for lunch the other day.

OK a follow up question - seeing as pretty much all the replies to this thread eulogized having an SSD, I went out and bought one for my new system; it was going to have a conventional hard drive but I found a decent SSD on Amazon for a reasonable price, so I now plan to clone the HDD when my new PC arrives, stick the SSD in and have the conventional disk daisy-chained in as a photo/music storage disk. Anyway, reading the blurb on my new SSD, it seems it comes with a RAM cache function, where it caches red/writes to RAM and then periodically flushes them to disk. This means you can get up to 10x better read/write performance from it, which seems amazing. Issue is, you have to give up up to 25% of your RAM to enable this. So, given that:

Will I notice a drop in RAM from 8GB to 6GB (bear in mind the most graphically intense game I plan on playing is Euro Truck Simulator 2, so I'm not working the system that hard)

Is the increase in disk performance worth any potential loss of RAM?

I appreciate this is all a little finger in the air' theorizing but I would like to know the potential options before I switch anything on.

Cheers!

RAM is one of those things where the amount doesn't matter until you run out, then it is the only thing that matters. Until your computer runs out you probably won't notice any difference at all, when it does run out it'll be brought to its knees.

Euro Truck Simulator has a recommended RAM of 4GB, so a bit of overhead if you want to run things in the background, 6GB is fine.

I'm currently playing Total War Warhammer and it's consuming about 5GB all by itself, with total system usage at 11.5GB because I have a lot of crap running in the background.

 Ouze wrote:
I'm using Samsung 850 pros in my desktop and VR PC, and 840 EVOS in less demanding machines.

Herzlos wrote:
SSD is night and day compared to a mechanical drive. By far the biggest bang for your buck.

I concur it should be the absolute first upgrade in any machine that does not have one, but before I spent the money I'd make sure my motherboard supported SATA3 and had an AHCI controller. No point in buying a Ferrari if you can'r drive faster than 30mph and I'm not sure it's a given AHCI is available in a motherboard 7 years old.

I must be the only person who doesn't really care about SSD's Sure, the system boots faster, but it's not like I'm spending significant time waiting for my computers to boot. My work computer doesn't have an SSD and my home one does and I can barely tell the difference. Maybe it's because my computers all have massive amounts of RAM windows just caches stuff that gets used frequently.

It is nice for reducing the loading times in games, but it depends on the game (really noticed the difference in Total War Warhammer, other games it's not as big of a deal), but it's one of the first places I cut if I want more performance from the GPU, CPU or RAM.

Back when SSD's first came out I reckon a lot of people were blown away mainly because they were going for a crappy old windows install that has been bogged down by years of bloatware to a fresh install, which is way faster even on a HDD.

EDIT: Though I will say I love SSD's in laptops, mainly because HDD's in laptops seem pathetically slow (probably because they're smaller diameter disks and are constantly parking to avoid damaging the disk if the laptop get bumped) and seem to wear out quickly.