Do I need more RAM or better HDD?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I only have money for either 4gb additional RAM or for a newer HDD, I don’t have money for both unfortunately, even at the cheapest place in my city, so what should I choose?

Currently I have:

  • 4 GB RAM

  • a HDD from year 2008. (it’s the only thing I didn’t upgrade on my PC), specifications are: WD Blue WD3200AAKS 320 GB - ****SATA-300 Series , Interface SATA 3Gb/s , Buffer Size 16 MB

The HDD I want to buy is: HDD SATA3 7200 500GB Toshiba P300, 64MB (there’s also a version with 1TB instead of 500GB)

The RPM is 7200 for both of them, but the buffer is 64mb for the new one and just 16 for the current/old one, plus there’s probably some more tech-y stuff I don’t understand.

Here are the games I play the most and the problems each of them has:

  1. Cities Skylines (RAM issue?)

Works great, even with a bunch of mods, until…I build up the city to reach some 50.000 citizens, then it just gets really choppy and slow and almost unplayable. For example it takes 30 real life seconds for a train to go around a route at the start, but with 50.000 citizens it takes 2 minutes, no road crossing points, no nothing, the game just works that slowly.
2. Flight simulator X/P3D (HDD issue?)

That game just by itself takes some 20, 30+ GB of space, mostly for terrain data, which covers the entire world. If you add real world ortophoto scenery to fly above (basically to make it like Google earth), the scenery can take up even more than a 30 additional GB just for a single Arizona sized scenery territory.

As a result, when you fly above detailed scenery, ortophoto, mountains,etc., it can take several seconds to load up the terrain at the normal quality, so you basically have to pause the game every few miles to wait for the terrain to load up, otherwise you just fly above a blurry mess. The FPS is great, but the terrain just takes ages to load up correctly, especially when flying with a fast plane.
3. TC ghost recon wildlands (HDD issue?)

Same problem, game itself works fine, but terrain sometimes takes 5 or more seconds to load up at decent quality. If I take a plane, I just fly above a blurry unloaded mess of a terrain…and all graphics settings in game are set to the lowest, other than maybe some anisotropic filtering stuff.

Wildlands also has a relatively big size on the HDD, so I suppose that it is related to the HDD mostly.

–

So what should I get, a (probably) faster and larger HDD or double up my RAM from 4 to 8GB?

2

For playing games, it may be better to invest in a better graphics card, rather than either RAM or HDD.

3

I have a new 2gb card, can’t remember the exact make, vx3d or something like that, but it can handle GTA V at highest resolution with high settings, so it’s probably something else. In any case, both HDD and RAM will make my computer run at least somewhat faster, I just want to know what will have a greater impact on the games I play.

4

As usual, the OP forgot the key piece of information: What OS are you using? E.g., just knowing if you are running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows makes a big difference on the RAM issue.

I see no reason to waste money on a sub-1TB drive. Even a 2TB drive is quite modest.

If you have a really old HD, then maybe your MB can’t support the speeds of new SATA drives. So that’s something to check into.

The issue is would a SSD be even better? But you might not want to spring for a 500GB SSD and a smaller SSD plus large HD is another thing.

So, what’s the budget here?

5

There’s a good chance that your CPU is what is holding you back in at least one of the games, but if you want the one thing most likely to help you in general, and also able to moved to a new PC later, it would be an Solid State (SSD) hard drive. Upgrading your hard drive to the one you propose will give you more space and a little more speed, but not really all that much. A new even 128GB SSD added as a second drive would do a lot more. But I wouldn’t necessarily expect miracles in any single upgrade case.

6

Have you looked at online prices? It might be cheap enough (compared to the local stores in your city) to buy both. Try www.pricewatch.com.

7

I answered the 32/64 bit question when I listed Ghost wildlands and GTA V as games I play, you can’t play them on 32, Windows 7 ultimate SP1 btw, so no problems in that department.

Motherboard is also new, average-ish, maybe 2, 3 years old at most, I have no idea what’s it called, but I had to buy it for the new graphics card to work. (Graphics card is btw. Vxt3d 2Gb modification of Radeon Hd 7700 series)

The budget is really, really small, as I said either enough for the:

  1. Toshiba P-300 HDD (500Gb or 1Tb, although I don’t need a lot of space, just performance, I have enough free space even now with a 300Gb HDD)

or for the

  1. 4GB of ram.

Nothing else, one or the other, I checked all the shops in my city (in Serbia, not in USA, so prices and offer are different) and I can’t afford both due to many other more important expenses I have now and I also definitely can’t afford a 240Gb SSD, which is double the price of the Toshiba HDD. Even a 120Gb is some 30, 40 USD more than a 1Tb P-300 and I’d prefer a 1Tb HDD to a expensive 120Gb SSD.

So…which one has the advantage and why, RAM or improved HDD? I’m thinking about going for the RAM, I think that it will have a much greater impact for both Cities skylines and for terrain loading in games, but maybe I’m wrong…

8

Four gigs of RAM will not noticeably improve your framerate, nor will it noticeably improve the load speeds of terrain etc, unless you are using integrated graphics.

I would argue that, at least as far as Cities:Skylines purposes go specifically, your money is better spent on an SSD now (which will significantly improve load screen times etc), and on saving up for a new GPU in the long run. 2GB of VRAM (which is the actual limiting factor in terms of being GPU-bottlenecked as opposed to CPU-bottlenecked) is very, very little for a modern rig, with most new cards sporting 4 or even 8GB of VRAM. I would go so far as to say that your card, at this point, is significantly outdated and cannot be expected to run modern releases well at all.

That said, 4GB of SDRAM isn’t exactly a lot either, so you may see other desired benefits from the RAM. It’s just not going to have a very significant effect on your Cities:Skylines experience, if that’s what you’re looking for.

9

What you need to do is find out what is causing the slowdowns. To do that, you need to use Task Manager and GPU-Z. Play your games and have these running on a second monitor. You want Task Manager to be showing the per-core CPU utilisation graphs, and you want GPU-Z showing the Sensors tab. If a CPU core is running at 100% then you are CPU-limited. Task Manager can also show RAM usage and if you’re using more than 4 GB you are RAM limited. GPU-Z performs similar tasks for the GPU. Armed with that information, you will be able to make an educated choice.

Off the top of my head though, your Radeon 7700 is well behind the times. You can get away with a 2012-vintage CPU, but a GPU of that vintage is another matter entirely. You should be looking at a 4 GB Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti as a bare minimum for games.

10

I’m definitely not a gamer, but I have quite a bit of experience with desktops and laptops in general. I’ve never seen a really significant improvement in performance by simply switching to an HDD with a larger cache. Yes, the improvement can be measured and it is real, but it’s not very significant. But you’re still using SATA 3 and it’s not as if you would be making any other really important changes.

And I agree that adding 4GB of memory probably won’t do much.

Put me in the column for recommending a new graphics card (about which I know very little, but have seen amazing results with upgrades) or an SSD. A 240GB SSD is about $80 (USD) and would definitely be noticeable in most applications. Again, I’m not a gamer, so I don’t have specific knowledge in relation to typical requirements.

11

Most games will benefit with a new video card. Although an SSD will improve all aspects of computing. I would recommend a 1050 GTX graphics card now and start saving for a SSD drive later.

12

The ‘upgrade’ for yoru hard drive as you propose in your OP won’t see a bit of improvement unless you are shit out of space already, or your drive is currently fuckly fragmented. Getting a SSD will give you a noticeable boost unless you fill it to the brim.

13

I can’t comment on the memory, but I am sure that a small cache upgrade on your hard drive will not appreciably change anything, especially since the drive is actually running at the same speed. Getting a larger hard drive is good if you’re running out of storage. But increased cache is not going to give you a noticeable increase in speed.

For hard drive speed, go SSD or go home.

Even if you just use a hybrid system, where you cache your SSD, or one where you put the OS and essential stuff on the SSD and keep the documents/music/videos on the HD.

14

Do you have a USB3 port?

If so, get a 32GB or 64Gb USB3 thumb drive, stick it in the USB3 port, and configure the whole thing as a ReadyBoost drive. Leave it there.

Then I would add the 4Gb Ram - it will get used to improve performance in some way.

Just my opinion, of course. But I have been using ReadyBoost USB on all our laptops for years, and it really does seem to help.

15

For Skylines, that sounds like a CPU issue while it’s processing more citizen actions. But yeah, a task manager or CPU-Z should tell you what’s actually bottlenecking. Or use FRAPS to get an idea of your frame rate. Some games tie game time to framerate, so if your graphics card is too slow (it might be by this point) that could also cause in-game time to slow down. Does it feel laggy when you try to move around the map, or are the graphics still perfectly smooth?

As for Flight Sim, a bigger hard drive won’t help with that. 7200 RPM is pretty much unnoticeable. Maybe a SSD would help, or a GPU with more VRAM. Again, run some benchmarks and see what’s topping out. Probably everything…

To succinctly answer your question, really, don’t bother upgrading anything. It won’t help with a budget that small. Save up for a bigger eventual upgrade (new generation CPU and/or GPU). You’re putting a band-aid on a machine dying of old age.

16

There is another way, hear me out here.

You can modify your OS (I assume windows if you are gaming) and strip it down to make it purely a gaming platform. check https://www.ntlite.com/… last I checked it was free and you can make an excellent copy of windows and strip out everything you do not want and just keep stuff for gaming. This has saved me over 700MB of ram usage and nearly frees the CPU from load. Also, if you have the cooling capacity try an overclocking tool along with the stripped down version. It’s guaranteed to work, I’ve done it many times in the past and it really boosts performance. That being said, getting more ram and a better graphics card is your best bet. Give the tweaks a shot, it’ll take a couple hours to do but IMO it is definitely worth the time for the performance boost. I’ve gotten away with playing new games on an underrated system with a nice combo of performance and graphical quality this way.

If you don’t want to try that, try modifying ‘services.msc’ (START>RUN) and disable all of the stuff you do not use. Then modify a few things with your graphics card software (ATI/Nvidia) and see what works best for you. Don’t neglect checking the BIOS at boot-up for any performance enhancing options that may be there.

These are ways to do things on the cheap/free that will actually work. Give it a shot if you have the experience, and it will definitely benefit your gaming. Happy gaming!