Solved Should I buy an SSD or more RAM?

[BlastHardCheese]

I'm planning some upgrades in the summer and I only have enough money to buy either an SSD or additional RAM. I already have 8gb of RAM, do I really need any more?

The primary purpose of my PC is gaming if that makes a difference.

 

[Layback Bear]

8 gb of ram will do most quite well.
A SSD will give you the most improvement for money spent. I know of no one piece of hardware that speeds things up for the money better than a SSD.

 

[LMiller7]

Almost certainly the SSD would be more beneficial.
An upgrade from 4 GB to 8 GB is useful but except for some very heavy workloads beyond 8 GB is usually a waste.

 

[Mellon Head]

An SSD for sure. It's the best speed improvement I ever made to my system for the money.

 

[BlastHardCheese]

An SSD it is. Thanks everyone.

 

[Layback Bear]

I would also suggest 120 Gb or bigger.

 

[Mark Phelps]

You should visit the HardOCP website -- as they did some performance benchmarks of Gaming comparing an SSD to an HDD -- and found, that apart from loading the game, real-time performance was no better using the SSD. If you don't believe me, visit their site and read the review they did.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

You should visit the HardOCP website -- as they did some performance benchmarks of Gaming comparing an SSD to an HDD -- and found, that apart from loading the game, real-time performance was no better using the SSD. If you don't believe me, visit their site and read the review they did.

True. The biggest gains from using an SSD is from greatly improved boot times and faster program loading. In the case of games, one will not get any more FPS with an SSD but, if a game has to load modules during play, those modules will load much faster.

If one is using a laptop and runs everything on the SSD, data access will be noticeably snappier when accessing large amounts at one time and battery life will improve since it takes far less power to run an SSD than it does even a small spinner. However, large SSDs are expensive.

RAM over 8GB will rarely lead to better gaming performance so, since the OP has a desktop that already has 8GB RAM, replacing an existing spinner will provide the best overall performance gain.