Old Gamer Memory Upgrade Worth It?

[rockit00]

Coming from SSHD's, every time I look at SSD's I get a headache! My Z97 now takes five minutes to fully boot to Windows 10. My Z390 boots to Windows 10/11 in two minutes flat which is acceptable for the 2TB SSHD's installed. I guess I'll focus on a couple of SSD's for the Z97 first and worry about memory upgrade later if needed. I've got to sort through a bunch of SSD types and pick the best for Haswell era hardware. There's a lot of info out there now days compared to 2014. With a fresh bottle of aspirin, SSD 101 here I come. No Pain, No Gain.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Coming from SSHD's, every time I look at SSD's I get a headache! My Z97 now takes five minutes to fully boot to Windows 10. My Z390 boots to Windows 10/11 in two minutes flat which is acceptable for the 2TB SSHD's installed. I guess I'll focus on a couple of SSD's for the Z97 first and worry about memory upgrade later if needed. I've got to sort through a bunch of SSD types and pick the best for Haswell era hardware. There's a lot of info out there now days compared to 2014. With a fresh bottle of aspirin, SSD 101 here I come. No Pain, No Gain.

Any NVMe drive will work, it's a Gen 3 interface. No need to sweat over DRAM either, it's just being overzealous. You'll do fine with quite literally any Gen 3 drive, just buy the highest capacity one you can afford from a reputable brand (WD, SanDisk, ADATA/XPG, Kingston, etc)

 

[Toothless]

PCI 3.0 NVME in a PCI slot with an adapter would work. Ran a 970 EVO in my 4790k for years just fine and it's still quick enough on the current SATA SSD. Why you're so against using an SSD for a boot drive is beyond me and you're just shooting yourself in the foot at this point.

It's really not rocket science.

 

[AusWolf]

I'm trying to run a benchmark in Avatar: FoP that I installed on a HDD for science, but instead, I've just been sitting here, looking at the loading screen for the last 20 or so minutes. HDD gaming is definitely not recommended.

 

[rockit00]

PCI 3.0 NVME in a PCI slot with an adapter would work. Ran a 970 EVO in my 4790k for years just fine and it's still quick enough on the current SATA SSD. Why you're so against using an SSD for a boot drive is beyond me and you're just shooting yourself in the foot at this point.

It's really not rocket science.

I just read about that adapter trick at the MSI forums yesterday. I don't have a problem with using an SSD for a boot drive. I used to run two nearly identical rigs until around 2016. I also had a MSI Z87-G45 Gaming build with the 4790k. I had a Sapphire HD 6950 Toxic 2GB in the Z97 and the Z87. I decided to sell the Z87, the 4790k and the Toxics and I installed the Z87 SSHD and 8GB ( 2x4 ) memory into the Z97 build for a dual boot rig. I upped the GPU to a R9 380 X. Just before the crypto craze I upped the GPU to a RX 580 8GB. I stopped building and upgrading until Dec 2024. Today it appears that brand new 1TB 2.5" SSD's are similarly priced compared to the brand new 1TB 2.5" Firecuda SSHD's. I'm a little concerned about SSD degradation compared to my current SSHD's and the way I use them. I do a lot of copying and erasing with SSHD's so I'll have to unlearn some unhealthy habits when I move to SSD's. I guess time will tell.

 

[nomdeplume]

I don't have a problem with using an SSD for a boot drive.

Were this me, which it is not.

I'd be digging out the manual from my motherboard to settle how much of an afterthought SSD was. Compared to what appears to be a ready made Optane M.2x2 slot (dual mode?). I'd also be looking at BIOS release notes for clues about SATA SSD support (M.2 & 2.5").

I've upgraded a z390 board a year ago from 16 to 32GB. This was with a 9900k. Besides the occasional game pushing 15GB ram usage, it didn't bring much improvement to the table. It's nice to look at on your screen, but for gaming you won't notice a difference.

This has been my experience also. TBH any modern browser makes you work really hard to crash RAM. +200 tabs and command line instructions shutting off numerous internal functions plus constantly clicking around to actively load 10's of pages.

I also somewhat agree with Lex to max everything out and ride high in ways that would've been nearly inconceivable at launch.

 

[lexluthermiester]

How many webpages do you plan on opening at once using Chrome? That may dictate the amount you need.

You mean FireFox? Because eff chrome.

4x8GB DDR3 kits are cheap enough, and if you can find one with a good XMP speeds, why not?

This! Seriously, it's better to have more than is needed than not have enough, even for a spare system.

 

[DirtyDingusMcgee]

You could upgrade the ram and then use said extra memory as ram cache for system drive. Primocache works very well.

 

[Princess Garnet]

Keep in mind, SSHD's are faster than HDD's. The SSD side improves performance dramatically. That performance is fine for system that isn't their primary system.

Sometimes. The phrase "things are only as slow as the slowest link in the chain" comes to mind. An SSHD is a hybrid between an HDD and SSD, and unless all of the Windows and application data fetched during boot is on the SSD portion (and this is presuming the SSHD can actually "store" it there as opposed to using the NAND portion entirely as cache), then it might not have (much) faster performance here. The thread starter mentioned having a 1 TB SSHD, and I recall that most SSHDs of around that size had pretty small NAND sizes of like 8 GB. I don't know what exact model it is so I can't say.

In any case, I don't see any indication of "I'm using all of my RAM" so my first guess is that bumping 16 GB to 32 GB won't help boot times (or anything), but the "slow boot" mentioned would have me looking at either the SSHD, an overloaded startup Windows install, and/or just the older 12 year old platform (since they mention the Coffee Lake platform is slightly faster and also uses an SSHD). I had an older Core 2 PC and moving from an HDD to an SSD was an unbelievable improvement in startup and overall responsiveness even on that. Even if the Haswell system is a dozen years old, it's still fast enough that saddling it with an HDD as the boot drive will vastly slow its startup and general responsiveness.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Sometimes. The phrase "things are only as slow as the slowest link in the chain" comes to mind.

As someone who owned and used a 750GB 7200RPM SSHD, I can share from personal experience that these types of drives perform very well in most situations, very SSD like most of the time.

An SSHD is a hybrid between an HDD and SSD

Are you kidding? Did you honestly think you needed to say that? Come on now.

and unless all of the Windows and application data fetched during boot is on the SSD portion (and this is presuming the SSHD can actually "store" it there as opposed to using the NAND portion entirely as cache), then it might not have (much) faster performance here. The thread starter mentioned having a 1 TB SSHD, and I recall that most SSHDs of around that size had pretty small NAND sizes of like 8 GB. I don't know what exact model it is so I can't say.

You clearly don't understand how they actually work. Try to remember, 8GB is enough space to store an ENTIRE Windows 11 install, WITH drivers. 8GB is more than enough to cache the most frequently used sectors of a drive, which is what they do. So unless they(the OP) NEEDS the entire drive to perform like an SSD, their SSHD will continue to do just fine as is.

In any case, I don't see any indication of "I'm using all of my RAM" so my first guess is that bumping 16 GB to 32 GB won't help boot times (or anything), but the "slow boot" mentioned would have me looking at either the SSHD, an overloaded startup Windows install, and/or just the older 12 year old platform (since they mention the Coffee Lake platform is slightly faster and also uses an SSHD). I had an older Core 2 PC and moving from an HDD to an SSD was an unbelievable improvement in startup and overall responsiveness even on that. Even if the Haswell system is a dozen years old, it's still fast enough that saddling it with an HDD as the boot drive will vastly slow its startup and general responsiveness.

Again, spoken like someone with no real-world experience with an SSHD. Here's an idea, get on Ebay and find yourself a 750GB or 1TB SSHD, buy it and try it out. Then come back and lecture us again on how well they work.

 

[rockit00]

I mostly have used Seagate SSHD's since the Momentus XT 750GB drives appeared. The Z97/Z87 drives are the Seagate 1TB 7200RPM drives with 8GB NAND. According to Hardware Monitor I currently have 36296 power on hours and 9240 power cycles on these drives! I like their performance compared to HDD's. They are now 130GB short of full capacity and loaded with lots of games, movies and fond memories. Nostalgia aside, I'm getting that old upgrade itch back now that the 2020 crypto-mania has settled down. I have used one SSD for a HP Spectre XT ultrabook repair a while back. It was a LiteON 256GB drive and that is the only SSD I've used. SSHD's are nothing to sneeze at but SSD's are becoming more appealing every day!

 

[lexluthermiester]

SSD's are becoming more appealing every day!

And that's fair. You can get a quality 1TB SSD for about $70 these days, less if you go with a DRAMless drive.

 

[Prime2515102]

Doesn't sound like you're doing anything to come close to using 16GB, are you? If not, upgrading to 32GB is kinda pointless IMO.

I wanted to go "future proof" and got 32GB in an i7-7700k system (that did 5Ghz without a hickup) and I've never touched 16GB.

I haven't had a problem with recent games unless I've tried to run 4k (with an nvidia 1080). I tend to want to run everything on max though. I'll reduce resolution before I'll turn visual settings down. 1440p is a compromise that I'm not willing to visit.

I haven't run any usable benchmarks lately. When I say "usable" I mean my completely subjective impression of how a game feels. I can't get that from a benchmark.

At any rate, I exceeded the tech with the amount of memory I built this system with. The same applies to older games that I wanted to run smooth at the time. Graphics memory is way more important.

 

[Marcus L]

You clearly don't understand how they actually work. Try to remember, 8GB is enough space to store an ENTIRE Windows 11 install, WITH drivers. 8GB is more than enough to cache the most frequently used sectors of a drive, which is what they do. So unless they(the OP) NEEDS the entire drive to perform like an SSD, their SSHD will continue to do just fine as is.

But in the OP's case his system is taking 5 mins just to load into Windows, whether that's to do with the capacity he has the drive at or other things that are being cached, even a SATA SSD as a boot drive would be a big improvement and my suggestion over 32GB RAM

 

[phill]

Lol. It's not related to RAM that your pc is slower, just an older system with weaker st etc. Adding more RAM from 16 to 32 won't magically make your 4 GB Windows install boot faster.

I thought bigger numbers for us blokes make all the difference so surely it must be twice as good?!?!?

Scanning over the replies, I can agree though with the SSD, definitely get one of those suckers in there.. They bring out a whole new experience.. Heck you could even use a PCIe adaptor card and get a cheap NVME drive in there if you wished... They aren't mega money at all and you might not need TB's of space either... Might be worth a thought or look maybe

 

[Macro Device]

Keep in mind, SSHD's are faster than HDD's. The SSD side improves performance dramatically.

As a former SSHD user I can assure you this idea stinks. The difference between an SSHD and HDD is barely significant. SSDs are dirt cheap and will improve everything for OP a lot. More RAM? I use my PC for AAA gaming and heavy stuff like game development so me having more than 16 GB is kinda justified but with his tasks? Seriously? Zero reason to bother.

 

[Princess Garnet]

As someone who owned and used a 750GB 7200RPM SSHD, I can share from personal experience that these types of drives perform very well in most situations, very SSD like most of the time.

Are you kidding? Did you honestly think you needed to say that? Come on now.

You clearly don't understand how they actually work. Try to remember, 8GB is enough space to store an ENTIRE Windows 11 install, WITH drivers. 8GB is more than enough to cache the most frequently used sectors of a drive, which is what they do. So unless they(the OP) NEEDS the entire drive to perform like an SSD, their SSHD will continue to do just fine as is.

Again, spoken like someone with no real-world experience with an SSHD. Here's an idea, get on Ebay and find yourself a 750GB or 1TB SSHD, buy it and try it out. Then come back and lecture us again on how well they work.

Uh, easy. I'm not intending to lecture anyone. I'm merely trying to give what I feel is the best advice for the described circumstances. I'm working with the information the thread starter themselves is sharing, and that information is...

1. No mention that the current capacity of RAM is being exhausted. Does this guarantee that they aren't exhausting it? No, but I shouldn't presume they are either.

2. Startup is slow. Very slow. And that's on not one but two PCs, both which have SSHDs as the system drive. It's "less slow" on the system with the larger SSHD. (Perhaps the larger SSHD also has a larger NAND portion, and so less of the startup process needs data fetched from the HDD portion? It's also possible the slower CPU on the slower PC is contributing, but... not to that extent.)

3. They just seem to be looking for the best ways to improve performance.

The rudeness and presumptions seem uncalled for when, based on that above criteria, I would say I am reasonable in concluding "more RAM isn't very likely to help much if at all, but a faster storage drive definitely might".

Let's presume I didn't have experience with SSHDs. It wouldn't take experience to know that something will only be as fast as the slowest part of the operation, because that's how PCs operate. SSHDs aren't exclusive to that. If data ever needs to be fetched and it happens to reside on the HDD portion, it will perform as an HDD. Obviously, the median performance of an SSHD will be better than an HDD, but not as good as an SSD either.

Even if the boot time itself wasn't being slowed down at all by the SSHD (I'd say this is unlikely with boot times like that...), it's still slowing general performance which is one of the things the thread starter seems to be looking to improve.

There could also be something else involved since 2 and 5 minutes seem rather slow even by HDD standards.

 

[eidairaman1]

Coming from SSHD's, every time I look at SSD's I get a headache! My Z97 now takes five minutes to fully boot to Windows 10. My Z390 boots to Windows 10/11 in two minutes flat which is acceptable for the 2TB SSHD's installed. I guess I'll focus on a couple of SSD's for the Z97 first and worry about memory upgrade later if needed. I've got to sort through a bunch of SSD types and pick the best for Haswell era hardware. There's a lot of info out there now days compared to 2014. With a fresh bottle of aspirin, SSD 101 here I come. No Pain, No Gain.

Just stick to your plan.

 

[Dr. Dro]

As a former SSHD user I can assure you this idea stinks. The difference between an SSHD and HDD is barely significant. SSDs are dirt cheap and will improve everything for OP a lot. More RAM? I use my PC for AAA gaming and heavy stuff like game development so me having more than 16 GB is kinda justified but with his tasks? Seriously? Zero reason to bother.

The hybrid SSHD was an idea for when desktop HDD capacities were still priced out of reach... it's not the case anymore.

 

[lexluthermiester]

But in the OP's case his system is taking 15secs just to load into Windows

Fixed that for you.

As a former SSHD user I can assure you this idea stinks.

Then you did something wrong.

2. Startup is slow. Very slow.

IF that's happening, someone has done or setup something wrong. An SSHD gets very quick & fast after a few boot cycles and it's had a chance to cache the most used sectors. People who judged SSHD performance based on the initial performance are not understanding how the technology works and not waiting long enough for it to do it's work properly. This was a common problem that is still misunderstood.

The rudeness and presumptions seem uncalled for when, based on that above criteria, I would say I am reasonable in concluding "more RAM isn't very likely to help much if at all, but a faster storage drive definitely might".

You get what you put out. You're statement was flawed to begin with. You're offering advice without seemingly understanding the full facts of the details the OP offered. Things like that can and tend to be harmful & misleading when someone is making purchasing choices.

There could also be something else involved since 2 and 5 minutes seem rather slow even by HDD standards.

Exactly. Most likely it's a Windows install problem. Easily solved with a fresh install.

 

[rockit00]

Well from what I've read today I'm guessing these Z97 SSHD's are slowly turning into HDD's. With 36,300 power on hours on them ( 4+yrs. ) the NAND has probably degraded substantially from heavy use. They are also running close to full capacity most of the time. This probably accounts for some of the 5 minute boot times. Also random power interruptions last year on our local power grid doesn't do these old Windows 10 installations any favors. We've come a long way since Windows XP, RAID 0 vs Velociraptors and PATA HDD's.

 

[eidairaman1]

Well from what I've read today I'm guessing these Z97 SSHD's are slowly turning into HDD's. With 36,300 power on hours on them ( 4+yrs. ) the NAND has probably degraded substantially from heavy use. They are also running close to full capacity most of the time. This probably accounts for some of the 5 minute boot times. Also random power interruptions last year on our local power grid doesn't do these old Windows 10 installations any favors. We've come a long way since Windows XP, RAID 0 vs Velociraptors and PATA HDD's.

I still have a velocitaptor, running any drive near capacity will degrade speed some on any drive

 

[Dr. Dro]

Only write speed, on HDDs due to physical location and on SSDs because the supply of simultaneously programmable NAND blocks will exhaust as capacity is filled, reducing write speed. VelociRaptors are fast but their foremost advantage is they're optimized for seek time (high rotation rate and 2.5 form factor), SSDs still put them in the ground.

 

[AUTOEXEC.BAT]

Back in the days when i had a 4670K, it started Windows 10/11 in less then 40 seconds.
With 8GB 1600MHz RAM and Samsung 830 256GB SATA SSD.

And the funny thing is:
A Core2Quad 9550 with 4GB was maybe max 5 seconds faster. Also with SATA SSD.

I tested them both with a clean install at the same moment with Windows 10. Both installed with only video drivers.

2 minutes loading time for a 4770/90 is too much. And i think the SSHD is the problem.

The SSD is also period correct to these Haswell systems. It was an upgrade to these systems back in the days. With 128 and 256GB it became acceptable prices.
The only reason to choose a SSHD was if you dont have the room to install more drives, or needed more storage. 512GB and 1TB were expensive.

But now, you can buy them used for €10, new max €20 (256GB)

 

[DaemonForce]

It really depends on a lot of things, primarily what you were doing before the system went EOL vs what you want to keep doing with it.
With no change in operation, everything is good. If you're squeezing clockspeed or memory, that could be good but some things may break.
If you change the roles, it can get real shaky. As an overclocker first, I've had a few gaming computers and this has been the experience.
Changing CPUs is usually okay. Changing memory for size is okay, for overclocking it's a coinflip. Adding new hardware is anyone's guess.

Pentium 4 3.00E with 512MB and Radeon 9200 -> 2GB and a AH3450, general Non-DOS gaming and very early Minecraft capable.
When I racked this, it became a gaming server and my fans LOVED it. Low latency high population (48人) community fragfest heaven.

Phenom II X4 955 with 4GB and HD3300 IGP -> 8GB and a HD6570, unlocked video editing, 3D modeling and early Unity VR support.
When I racked this it didn't last very long. It underlined issues that were happening with prior storage and the onboard IGP. Garbage.

FX-8370 with 16GB...I'm at a crossroads with this one right now and it's the closest compare that I have to the 4790K. How's that? Well...

Close enough. Not a bad performer but not great either. One pattern you'll notice is these are all retired gaming computers.
I obsoleted the FX box with the R5 3600 and RX580 for general desktop. I've been on a gaming hiatus for a while.
Functionally, FX is a workhorse. I can toss my RX580 in there for support but it's just random JBOD management.
The chassis is a very generic 2U that holds a bunch of disks that are basically just there to exist (for now).

It deserves to be useful for the future by turning it into a video rack so I'm collecting information on some cards.
AVerMedia, Blackmagic, NZXT capture cards...Radeon Pro WX2100/3100 or Quadro P400 for display out/NVENC.
Basically a dedicated rec/stream. It's capable and has the PCI-E lanes to spare. The CPU is already the best pick.
Memory is another issue. I've gone through a few boards that don't like more than single DIMM per channel.
Intel boards of that era don't typically respond very well to high speed memory but I can run 16GB 2133 all day.
It may be possible to double up to 32GB but no idea if it makes the FX memory controller or mainboard screech.

You most likely won't have that issue but if you're looking at doing anything where you need the extra memory, do it.
I main a DDR2 box for my main storage server and the good kits are GONE gone. DDR3 is still in a discount sweet spot.
That window will probably close by the end of this year since DDR4 memory has gotten much cheaper as of late.
As for anything you plan on slotting into your board, start counting lanes, specifically the ones that can be used.
You'll figure things out very quickly.