I have 2x16 DDR4 PC-3200 installed. I recently came into some free RAM, and I have a choice between 2x8 PC-2933 or 2x16 PC-2666. As I understand it either will slow my current RAM, does it make sense to install either? I do some gaming but my video card is certainly the bottleneck there for now, though I may upgrade in the future. I do some medium data processing (no graphics) sometimes but mostly at work so that’s not a major concern.
Am I better off installing one over the other? Neither?
32GB is likely more than enough for whatever you’re doing. Not that I know what you’re doing.
Are you running RAM-constrained right now? 32 G is enough for most lightweight personal use.
Adding more RAM doesn’t much help unless you’re currently running out from time to time.
If 32GB isn’t enough for what you are doing now, I’d assume you understand enough of computers to make an informed decision.
If you just think it is a shame to throw shit out… Leave the box with the blinkenlights closed.
It’s never a good idea to mix your RAM, so I recommend against doing that. Also, are you sure your present motherboard can recognize and utilize more than 32 GBs of RAM?
70% at just idling, I’ll check gaming etc. later. Probably could cut back on Firefox tabs too.
@Jasmine yes, 128 GB.
This is what I suspected, actually. Firefox is a pig. I use it, and I like it, but if I want my system (Intel 13th Generation i7, all NVME storage, 32 G of ram) to run halfway decent, I restrict myself to at most 6 tabs.
Holy cow! 
This. It was a very good choice 10-ish years ago. Not anymore.
Why? I use it, too. I have a gaming machine at home and, when I launch Firefox, it spins for about 30 seconds before coming up even though my home page is Google.com and no other pages open on startup.
<speculation>Old code base. Small development team and shrinking budgets. That kind of thing.</speculation >
I still prefer it over Chrome or Edge, greatly, and I’ve got it set up the way I like it, but I know better than to do too much with it.
Really? It’s a basic gaming-style MSI motherboard. A workstation at work is quite old and takes 256 GB (8 slots). That’s pretty crazy.
Are you sure? 10 years ago is about the nadir of Firefox, then they’ve improved. It’s not like Chrome is known to be memory-friendly, and has bigger security concerns. Don’t want to use Chrome? Too bad, almost all browsers except Firefox are Chrome (Chromium).
I’d rather have more RAM than faster RAM. Slow RAM is still much faster than even a speedy SSD, so if extra ram can be used for caches and such, it is still likely to speed things up.
I’m sure people can think of specific use cases where it’s better to have less but faster RAM, but I don’t think those will apply to a computer used for general tasks. I care how quickly a program resumes from the task bar, not how fast I can multiply some big matrices or whatever.
For example, on my current desktop I have 32GB. Only 17GB is in “use” now, but the rest is being used by buffers and caches. The OS is smart enough to not let extra RAM be wasted. Those buffers and caches can be dropped if I need more RAM for running programs.
Having said all that, unless you’re actively paging to disk with 32GB, you’re unlikely to notice big difference going to 64.
It is compared to Firefox.
I was a Firefox evangelist. I was a fan of Netscape back in the day, then when that browser died, a bunch of ex-Netscape folks put together the Mozilla browser. I used that until it evolved into Firefox. And then I used that for many years.
I finally swapped over to Edge when it went from its previous horrible incarnation to the Chromium version and it’s like taking of a backpack full of bricks. And I switched a few years ago, it’s not like I’m remembering some decade-old version. Firefox is extremely inefficient.
It was painful at first for me to switch because I had so many extensions that did things I wanted to, but maybe that was part of why it was so slow. With Edge I haven’t felt like I needed more than a couple of them. (One for ad-blocking, one to help with downloading videos, and that’s it really.) But Firefox was clunky even when I turned off most of the extra stuff.
Going back to the original question, I concur that you should only increase RAM if you find that you’re maxing it out regularly. It’s like buying a bigger wheelbarrow; if you only ever fill it halfway, why would you need a bigger one?
If we were talking about buying RAM, I’d agree with everyone here not to bother. But we’re talking about something the OP is getting for free.
If you have an Intel CPU, there is very little difference with RAM speeds. You might as well get the highest memory.
If you have an AMD CPU, there is a bigger difference. However, if you are correct that your GPU is your bottleneck, that likely won’t matter. I’d still get the highest memory.
And if you don’t want to use it, and might consider selling it, the highest memory would likely be your best bet.
In short, I don’t see a good argument for not getting the 32GB kit.
I wouldn’t use that as a benchmark of being close to running out. Modern operating systems use as much of the RAM as they can get for caching, since completely unused RAM is wasted. So the OS and apps will pile as much into the available space as possible, but they’ll also immediately flush it out if the RAM is needed for something that’s actually important. Swap usage, page-ins/page-outs, and compressed memory are better metrics to watch. Also, games tend not to be so RAM heavy that they need more than 32 GB. Even Cities: Skylines, which can get bloated by thousands of custom assets (buildings, vehicles, trees, etc.) is one of the few games where having more RAM might help, but we’re still talking 32 GB instead of 16 GB.