Is it worth going from 16GB to 24GB for 4K

[funkytwig]

I have a nvida 1060 GPU and a i7 3770 3.4Ghz CPU and 16GB memory.  People keep saying i should have 32GB for 4k editing but looking at the task manager it does not seem to even use up all the 16GB.  Am I missing something.

I Have 4x4GB ram sticks in so was thinking of trying to replace 2 of the 4s with 8s to get a total of 24GB.  Is this worth doing?  Can always get another 2 8GB at a later date,. My motherboard is a Gigabyte Z77-DS3H so the most memory I can put is is 32GB, I think migeststicks is 8GB.

[Peru Bob]

What is your hard drive setup (how many, what kind, what is on each, and how full)?

[R Neil Haugen]

The most that CPU can handle is 32GB.

Peru Bob's question is very pertinent and needed. Also ... that older CPU seems to have only four cores and a fairly small cache. It may well not be able to use much of the added RAM if you gave it more. What's the CPU use during playback say?

Neil

[RjL190365]

I wouldn't recommend it, especially for such an elderly PC. There is a good risk that the new memory modules won't work well or at all when mixed together with your existing RAM. Mixing completely different memory densities is a recipe for significant trouble, if not downright disaster, especially to the PC's stability.

Plus, any added RAM won't do you any good if your other components, such as the CPU or GPU, show maxed or nearly maxed out usage while the RAM usage remains relatively low.

So, in this situation, if you see the CPU usage get pinned at or near 100 percent through the entire render job, but the RAM and GPU usage remains low or erratic, then you need an entirely new, more up to date CPU platform with more CPU cores and threads than your current PC. You might have wasted money on that GTX 1060 if you were to have continued using that Ivy Bridge-era PC for the foreseeable future. A GTX 1050 Ti might have been more apropos for that aged CPU.

[Diddy82]

I actually just did this upgrade, going from 16GB memory to 24GB memory, and I did see a modest improvement in performance.  However, if you don't see memory utilization at or near 100%, don't waste your money  I did the upgrade because I was maxing out my memory.  I also just upgraded to an SSD for storage of my media, cache, project files and scratch and saw a bigger improvement in performance from that.  Cheaper too.  (Previously I worked with media on my HDD and kept everything else on the O/S SSD)

Dell XPS 8900

Intel i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz  (6th Gen)

24GB DDR4 Memory at 2133 MHz

GeForce GTX 1060 6GB

Samsung 850 Evo SSD - O/S and Apps

Samsung 860 Evo SSD - Media, project files, media cache, scratch

Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200RPM, 64MB Cache - Long-term storage

[Mo Moolla]

Theres no such thing as too little RAM. Max it out. It helps.