16GB to 32GB ram(DDR3) on 4790k (max-out)

Hello,
would you find upgrading 16GB(2x8) to 32GB - buy 2x8 additional modules worth?
There’s nice offer for 2x8GB 2133 Gskill Ares for 48€ at the moment (this model: F3-2133C11D-16GAR - Overview - G.SKILL International Enterprise Co., Ltd.)
It’s also low profile. and is going to fit under my NH-U14S.

TLDR: Do you think, DDR3 is going with price down in next year or two, or will it become rarer and thus more expensive than now.


16GB has been enough for last 10 years on this cpu (except times when I was running multiple virtualbox vms in parallel, and my unoptimized “bruteforce” solutions for adventOfCode :grinning:).

Despite the cpu not being officially supported by win11, and win10 eol coming in less than year…
I have been testing/daily driving this system with win11 (tpm + cpu check disabled during install) without any issues.
Performance in benches, games is on par, or within margin of error comparing to win10.
Therefore I don’t see a reason to change, unless cpu/mobo dies.

Even if I decided to upgrade the whole platform, I would like to keep this system for homelab / nas purposes.

Would you go for this deal, or not worth?

Thanks :slight_smile:

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I think the higher quality DDR3 DIMMs are slowly becoming rare and I do not think they are going to drop in price a lot, it seems more the opposite is true that the better DIMMs are already more pricey then components of that age should be. Cheaper no-big-name DIMMs can still be had for reasonable prices.

As for your use case, if you still have use for the machine I do not see why investing in more RAM would be a bad thing. If the 16 additional GB will be worth the money is up to you though. If your use cases can not benefit from more memory it would be wasted money, but if they can benefit you will make your machine able to be useful for you for a fair bit longer.

I can only recommend that for hardware that old you check the used market. I had a quick glance at the local used market for DDR3 for this answer and while some DIMMs comparable for the ones you posted cost nearly 80€ others, with the same specification can be had for less then half of that, below 40€.

I, personally, would say go for it but make sure to not overpay for the DIMMs.

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You don’t need 2133. 1600 2x8GB is pretty cheap.

I have Corsair Vengeance 2x8GB with single XMP profile 2133mhz, that has been rock solid.
For this reason I’m considering to go for another kit in this frequency (although different brand).

Furthemore the pricing is not that different. (Cheapest 1600mhz from gskill is 38€, what is 10€ diff. I’m going to pay half of that for shipping, so not real reason to consider it). And that is Ripjaws with it’s ugly huge heatsink, which I would either need to rip off, or cut with dremel :smiley: )

I ran a 4790K with 32GB for nearly a decade. With all four slots populated do not expect to attain 2133. You could try, with some luck and manual tweaking you might get it stable. The best my chip could handle was 1833Mhz.

DDR3 isn’t going to get cheaper, and boutique, higher speed kits are becoming rarer every year. Micron only had basic high CAS latency 1600 when I had to RMA my DDR3 kit, and they didn’t even send a matched kit. One of the four modules I was sent back is an entirely different PCB with different chips. I have to agree with the other posters, for a platform that old you should just try a used kit somewhere first, though $105 for a 32GB of 1866 kit new isn’t that bad.

As for CPU performance, Haswell is anemic and there’s no getting around it. My 7700X can run Stellaris on settings at triple fast speed that will crash my old 4790K on slow. FPS mins & averages in other games went up across the board. VM performance is substantially improved as well.

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Agreed - I had issues for a long time running 4x4 2133MT RAM on my i5-4690k. Back than I managed to get it to run stable by disabling XMP and putting in the timings and voltage written on the sticks manually. I guess the auto subtimings on my Gigabyte board were a bit more conservative that way.

For 32GB of DDR3-2133 you would need to find an elusive 2x16GB dual-rank kit, otherwise four DIMMs would put too much strain on the IMC. The same applies for modern platforms as well, two dual-rank DIMMs almost always offers the best performance (on desktop).

I actually have a random stick of Gskill DDR3-2400 that was from a 4x8GB kit that cost about $400 in 2013 dollars and it calls for 1.65v :dizzy_face:

It depends, while playing modded minecraft I’ve noticed that my 4gen i7 something ([email protected] GHz) the CPU looks like its memory bandwidth starved (the modpack(s) just take longer to launch despite not using 100% CPU time).

But definetly doesn’t make much sense to pay much more for the faster ram, the difference is there, sometimes, but not that big of a deal tbh