12G of RAM on old CPU with low performance. Suggestions?

I'm runnning Win 7 Pro 64bit on an ADM A6 -5400K with Radeon HD 3.6G and got 12G of installed RAM. I also got a 60G SSD where all OS files are installed and got a second drive where all applications are being installed. I recently added an upgrade to my RAM and increased it to 12G (was 6) however i have not seen much increase in performance. To be more precise i often notice in task manager the CPU graph to limit up while memory remains under 50% (~4G of use). I had disabled pagefile but with not much success and now re-enabled it. Is there any suggestion from you in order to take advantage more of my new memory or i should definately replace my CPU?
PS Its my work PC, mainly run Office Apps, no games

I don't think that office applications are in much need of large memory, or high CPU power. Pagefile needs to run (let windows manage it to be safe) and make some file check. Hard disk might cause an issue; does it have enough free space? Also you can run a disk check on it.

If Resource Monitor shows that you are using only 4 GB of RAM, the extra 6 GB you recently bought was a waste.

I don't game and use mostly Office applications and my RAM usage is rarely even 3 GB.

With all that free RAM, there isn't much point to fiddling with the page file. You could put it on some other drive to save space if you wanted to, but the fact is that you apparently are rarely using the page file--which is to be expected.

You have a very modest CPU that scores 2139 on the Passmark CPU benchmark. By way of comparison, a 5 year old Intel i5-2500 that cost about $200 when new scores 6211. You can buy a current Intel CPU for $86 that scores 3789.

You're missing out on some of the advantages of the SSD by putting applications elsewhere (I'm assuming on a spinning hard drive), but maybe they won't fit on the SSD.

ignatzatsonic said:

If Resource Monitor shows that you are using only 4 GB of RAM, the extra 6 GB you recently bought was a waste..

You need to poke "Resource Monitor" shown at the bottom of that picture to see Resource Monitor.

But the picture you posted shows that you have 8.69 GB of RAM still available.

Hi there

IMO the best thing you could do would be to install a new SSD - those old 60GB ones are ist gen and newer one's will simply blow it away even on an old machine.

The real problem is the slow spinner where you have your applications.

IMO what you should do is buy a 256 GB SSD (they are very cheap now) and re-install programs and OS on the SSD. Data files (music, video, documents etc) leave on the spinner.

The difference in performance will be stunning -- even on an old machine. With 12GB RAM no point is doing anything with paging / other files.

Running out of CPU power is usually the last problem -- unless you are running a lot of scientific calculations or doing video editing -- converting say even a DVD rip to an MKV / mp4 file will use a LOT of processing.

In my experience over 90% of poor performance I've seen is usually due to poor hard disks and disk configuration.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Hi there

IMO the best thing you could do would be to install a new SSD - those old 60GB ones are ist gen and newer one's will simply blow it away even on an old machine.

Cheers
jimbo

Thanks thats a future plan, however i would like to avoid extra cost right now

ignatzatsonic said:

You need to poke "Resource Monitor" shown at the bottom of that picture to see Resource Monitor.

But the picture you posted shows that you have 8.69 GB of RAM still available.

That's my question! Since i got much of RAM available is there any way to actually take advantage of it and increase performance with some tweaking?

georegepal said:

That's my question! Since i got much of RAM available is there any way to actually take advantage of it and increase performance with some tweaking?

No.

Windows 7 does a good job of memory management. Windows is using all it needs to use--less than 4 GB in your case.

You wasted money and need to upgrade other parts.

Within reasonable limits adding memory will always improve performance. But there will always be a point of diminishing returns beyond which there will be little improvement. With 6 GB RAM you were approaching that limit and with 12 GB you are well beyond it. Windows is very good at using the available resources to best advantage but there are limits.

A basic principle in improving computer performance is that you must first determine the bottleneck, the component that is limiting performance more than any other. Unfortunately this is often not understood and the component that is most convenient is upgraded. This often means a significant expense that does little or nothing for performance.

There was a time when a RAM upgrade was the most cost effective way to improve performance. And if memory is the problem an upgrade will be a good idea.

In past years the real performance bottleneck was often a slow hard drive but with the technology of the day there wasn't much that could be done about it. But the availability of high performance SSDs has changed that. In many cases a good SSD will do more for performance than anything else.