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My development machine is heavy on memory usage. It currently only has 4GB of PC5300. I'm going to buy 8 GB of RAM, but should I take out all my existing memory and install just PC6400 or leave some of the original and stick with 5300? I don't know if I'll ever need more than 8GB, I might, I'm just wondering if the speed difference between 5300 and 6400 is worth trashing the 2 or 3 GB of old RAM I would still have room for after adding the new RAM.

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Why not just try it and see? If you are buying the memory anyway a simple test will be more effective then us guessing. – Zoredache Jun 17 '10 at 1:05
Because PC5300 is cheaper than PC6400 – jayrdub Jun 17 '10 at 1:07
What kind of development do you do? It's likely you won't notice a difference in speed between the two, because the hard drive will be the bottleneck anyway. – Sasha Chedygov Jun 17 '10 at 6:54
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migrated from serverfault.com Jun 17 '10 at 6:51

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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

If your job runs in 8gb, the faster 8gb will be a little faster.

If your job takes 9gb, the 10gb will be dramatically faster than the 8gb.

If your job takes 11gb, you'll need to test to see which is faster; it's likely but not certain that the 10gb would be faster than the 8gb.

If you're not sure, go for the larger amount of ram.

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up vote 1 down vote

If you're worried about cost, go cheap. Any RAM is faster than swapping to disk.

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