Ram question

[Nolanl83]

Hello everyone,

So my 19 year old brother is looking into getting into pc gaming, hes about to purchase an older PC off a friend with an i5 6500 and 16gbs of ddr3 ram, now if I wanted to give him an upgrade, ( and going with ram ) Does it need to be the same clock speed, or same brand or what has to be the same for it to work at peak performance

[r2724r16]

5 minutes ago, Nolanl83 said:

now if I wanted to give him an upgrade, ( and going with ram )

Why are you upgrading RAM? He already has 16GB of it (which is plenty for gamers).

[Nolanl83]

Just now, campy said:

First make sure it's actually DDR3 and not DDR4, skylake had a few boards that took DDR3 but it's not common at all.

youll need to know which motherboard he has to see what ram it supports and how much of it

could be maxed at 16gb of ddr3, might take 32gb, might really be DDR4, there's a lot of specifics 

ask what motherboard he has and see what you can get as an upgrade.

 

personally I don't see 32gb of ram being too useful on a system with an i5 6500 anyway, look into things like an i7 upgrade or maybe an ssd 

I at first thought it should be DDR4 Aswell considering my 5th gen I7 runs ddr4 but he does alot of video editing aswell its one of his passions that he hasnt been able to fully pursue so I felt that being the younger brother, who somewhat got him into PC's that upgrading something that wouldnt break my bank would be a good Idea. I can see an SSD Being a good option aswell.

[Nolanl83]

2 minutes ago, r2724r16 said:

Why are you upgrading RAM? He already has 16GB of it (which is plenty for gamers).

Because hes into Photo and video editing and if im not mistaken spending 80$ to double his ram would be a good future proofed purchase.