RAM - upgrade?

zarakand

Prince
Joined
Nov 4, 2005
Messages
562
Location
Chicago
I'm wondering what difference RAM will make for me. I currently have 8gb, everything runs fine (only played standard maps so far). But I love to play huge maps all civilizations. My system is about 5 years old but in fairly decent shape I think:
dell xps 8300
i7-2600 3.4ghz
ATI Radeon 7750 1gb
8gb ram

Would I notice any difference at 32gb ram? It's about $140 to upgrade and I figure I'll hang on to this desktop till it stops working as it's also my Plex server.
 
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The max your motherboard will support is 16GB. Which is fine because you don't need more than that. In fact it is very arguable that you don't even need that much. However, if upgrading, check your current deployment and number of available RAM slots first. If you already have 2x 4GB modules and 4 RAM slots (this would be standard but 4x2GB in 4 slots or 2x4GB with 2 slots is also possible). You can find out this info without opening the case with various tools, I use CPU-Z but many exist. This will also help you to match your new memory with your current memory when ordering online if it turns out that you have the expected 2x4GB w/ 4 slots total.

All of that said, if I was focusing money on a potential upgrade from the listed components I would, without equivocation, focus on the GPU. Everything else you have will see you through the 2-3 years at a comfortable level of gaming. That card is your overall weak link for sure.but neither upgrading that or your memory will help with Huge maps much. Huge maps are not troublesome because they themselves are large requiring lots of memory, rather that they have more pieces on them that must be accounted for at the end of every turn. More civs to calculate tactics for, more troops to move, more fights to resolve, etc. This is what results in very long turn times towards the end of the game which is the main drawback of huge maps. The only thing that could really help here is upgrading your CPU which is the last item on that list that I would consider upgrading.

Given this is all a bit of a Catch 22 what I would recommend you do is play a game on a huge map with all the civs and see if the turn times become too much for you. If so, maybe you have something to consider but otherwise save up for that GPU man, $140 is approx half of what you need there.
 
Thanks for the advice. I'm hoping this PC will last me until 2018 or 2019 as my primary PC, since most of what I do on it is media consumption, MS office stuff, and play Civ. I'd like to buy a laptop as my next PC and leave this one running as a media server for our house after that.

I saw on many websites that the motherboard would only support 16gb, and on a whim bought 32 from Best Buy because of a Rewards coupon. I have 14 days to return it, and I'm thinking of returning 16gb and keeping 16gb. But my question is Windows is recognizing all 32 in there. Why/how does it when most sites say the motherboard can't support more than 16? What exactly is happening here in computing terms for a layman like me?

Thanks
 
It's likely that your motherboard has a later BIOS revision that those listed in the default spec-sheet, which is what I checked. This would be reasonably common with manufacturers like Dell because they would frequently use the same motherboards in several models so as to spread cost. If later in the life of this motherboard (after your product was originally released and the documentation already drawn up) they wanted to offer a package using the same motherboard but with a 32GB option then they would have installed a newer BIOS to allow that functionality. This would mean that later editions of your model will also feature this ability.

You can actually check this by downloading the CPU-Z tool I was talking about earlier. It will list your Motherboard and BIOS revision. You can then usually Google that specific revision and even look at the differences between revisions to see when the change occurred. I wouldn't be worried though, if your motherboard did not support that amount of memory it would not have booted at all when you first installed it.
 
i just got a new machine and transferred my late game save over....graphics are better but late game turns on huge maps still take long....what component would speed this up...or what should i do to make it faster?
16 gigs ram
4.0 ghz amd 3
gf gtx 1060 3 gb
 
It's likely that your motherboard has a later BIOS revision that those listed in the default spec-sheet, which is what I checked. This would be reasonably common with manufacturers like Dell because they would frequently use the same motherboards in several models so as to spread cost. If later in the life of this motherboard (after your product was originally released and the documentation already drawn up) they wanted to offer a package using the same motherboard but with a 32GB option then they would have installed a newer BIOS to allow that functionality. This would mean that later editions of your model will also feature this ability.

You can actually check this by downloading the CPU-Z tool I was talking about earlier. It will list your Motherboard and BIOS revision. You can then usually Google that specific revision and even look at the differences between revisions to see when the change occurred. I wouldn't be worried though, if your motherboard did not support that amount of memory it would not have booted at all when you first installed it.

Thanks this was really helpful. I checked out CPU-Z and turns out I'd updated my BIOS a while back had forgotten I'd done that. I think I'm going to return 16gb and save $70 because it doesn't seem like the extra gb of ram will make any difference in what I'm doing on my computer.

Do you know anything about the upcoming GTX 1050? It seems like this is a budget version of NVIDIA's cards and might be able to play civ VI on ultra hd? If so I'll use the $70 from the ram towards it and ask for it to be my Christmas present.
 
i just got a new machine and transferred my late game save over....graphics are better but late game turns on huge maps still take long....what component would speed this up...or what should i do to make it faster?
16 gigs ram
4.0 ghz amd 3
gf gtx 1060 3 gb

I think based on Callan's comments it would be the CPU...but I don't know much about this type of stuff. 4.0ghz seems very fast but perhaps there's something to the generation of the AMD chip?
 
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