What's best these days? 16Gb slow memory, or 8Gb fast

I managed to do some cloud gaming on a 1Gb ram device, so I’d say go with whatever suits you best. Unless you really, REALLY need to browse lemmy on a 4k res. Then 16Gb ram is the bare minimum.

16GiB, the modern web is starting to be quite rough on 8GiB. Unless you have a very performance sensitive application, I don’t think the timings matter that much.

I have never heard of anyone complaining about ‘slow RAM’. On the other hand, I’ve heard of countless dreads on lack of RAM.

Seriously tho, can anybody actually perceive that speed difference?

I have literally never felt the impact of slower RAM speed and I’ve been building PC’s for 30+ years. In every case, adding more was a boost, even if it wasn’t “needed”. Memory timings make a tiny difference to FPS in a game, or might slightly slow down rendering by a tiny fraction, but the increased performance of reduced swapping and other improvements it brings will definitely help out.

Stick with 16.

Linux is pretty efficient with RAM, 8 GB will probably allow you do do most things fine, especially one or two at a time, but 16GB allows for more multitasking, faster ram only gives you a small performance boost in certain niche scenarios.

I’d wager most of the time, 16GB allowing you to keep 2x as much info cached in memory will be a bigger performance boost on average than having a faster clock.

Under your described use case it probably won’t make a huge difference unless you’re editing massive photos or watching several porn streams at the same time.

I’d stick with 16GB unless you encounter any instability from having mixed spec RAM, at which point I would pull one to see if that solves anything.

More memory.

The clock speed might result in a very small performance different under specific workloads. 8GB will result in performance issues basically everywhere with modern apps and websites.

Even slow RAM is a thousand times faster than swap. Search for “memory hierarchy” for a better idea of why.

My gaming PC survived from 2021 to 2026 without “overclocked” RAM because the BIOS would just error out in the POST when I enabled DOCP to boost it from 2600 to 3200 MHz.

A Bios update this spring finally solved it. It was a nice little performance boost, but not that much as I expected. So I guess you’re fine with slower RAM.

Even if you never hit the 8gb ceiling, having some room is not bad. That’s because how operating systems work. The less free RAM you have, the more of the RAM are parked outside into files, for parts of the RAM the system and applications thinks it is not crucial to the performance and not used in a while. Emulating 16 bit games won’t require much RAM. Editing images will require lot of RAM and benefits from fast RAM the most (out of the activities you described). Browsers require lot of RAM too, but does not need fast RAM.

Without any benchmarks and real world testing, overall in doubt, 16gb is a better choice than 8gb on modern operating systems and activities, unless you know for a fact that the 8gb are not limiting and you benefit from the speed bump in very certain applications. If you can, why not remove the additional 8gb to have consistent set with higher clock speeds and test it yourself for a day or so and see how it works out?

If you already have enough RAM, adding more does nothing. In this case, increased RAM speed, which still does almost nothing, is preferable.

But going forward, my money is always on RAM needs increasing. The RAM that’s enough today probably won’t be enough in a few years. That alone is enough reason for me to choose the higher capacity option.

The final option is to sell the excess RAM, and buy a yacht. Or put the money in a savings account and wait for prices to come back down, at least below what you sold it for. Beware that predictions on this are absolutely all over the board, so you’d be taking a risk. But DDR4 is already pretty old, and will disappear soon enough anyway.

Yeah, depends.

How much do you load on your workhorse and how fast do you need it to run?