If you have read the latest news about what the games coming out this year will need to work, you will have seen that there is a component that has triggered the performance necessary to work. We are referring to system memory and it is that after 16 GB was the recommended capacity for many, suddenly we find ourselves with games that ask for 24 or even 32 GB of RAM. Is it time to upgrade your RAM?
One of the double-edged swords of the PC is its NUMA architecture, which consists in the fact that apart from RAM, each of the support processors can have its own RAM. This avoids conflicts and saturations in memory access and allows each component to work without being limited by memory communication. As well as providing you with the best possible type of memory for each. However, this configuration has a weak point.
Time to upgrade RAM to 32 GB
Which can be summarized in that the information has to go through the system memory before being copied to the specific ones, which forces much more memory to be needed. So it is normal that if, for example, the games use graphics cards with higher VRAM requirements, then the use of RAM increases. In any case, until now the 16 GB in the form of a configuration of two 8 GB modules, for the use of dual channel DDR4 or quad channel DDR5 were the best options.
However, we have already seen how the PC version of Returnal and Forspoken in their recommended requirements they ask for 32 GB and they will not be the only ones and it is expected that many others that will appear this year will also do so. Which means the need to expand the memory in many computers. In any case, that is not a problem since many motherboards have 4 slots with only 2 of them occupied.
Of course, there are exceptions, as is the case of laptops with SO-DIMM modules that usually include two of them and, therefore, it will be necessary to change all the RAM. However, those who are going to have it worse in this regard are those with memory soldered onto the board and who cannot expand their memory capacity.
What are the options to expand the RAM?
Well, we have four different scenarios. However, we have decided to rule out the use of DDR3 due to the fact that we consider that users of processors that use this type of memory fall far behind the requirements recommended by the new high-calibre games that will appear this year.
portable
Laptops with SO-DIMM modules come with only two slots, so we will have to expand the RAM completely. If you don’t want to throw away your memory, you can move it to another laptop that has less capacity in that sense or a MiniPC. Another option would be to sell it second hand or give it to a friend. We consider the kit with two 16GB Corsair Vengeance modules a good option if you use a gaming laptop with DDR4 support. If, on the other hand, you are one of the lucky ones with a laptop with support for DDR5 memory, we recommend the module of the same brand, but with this type of memory and the same configuration of 2 x 16 GB.
Desk
If you have a tower PC, it would be good to look at what model of motherboard it uses first, since it is important to know the number of RAM sockets you have available. In the event that you have four of them and two occupied by two 8 GB modules, then you only have to find two additional ones of the same type to reach 32 GB of RAM. However, we believe that it is much better to change the memory and opt for a 16+16 configuration, leaving the other two sockets free for potential eventualities.
So once again we have chosen two different products: the first is a Corsair Vengeance Pro kit made up of two DDR4 modules of 16 GB each. While for DDR5 we have chosen G.Skill Trident Z5 memory with the ability to overclock up to 6 GHz.
