Small upgrade (RAM)

Jmtzaguirre · December 10, 2024

Budget (including currency): EUR 100 (just for the parts, worktime not included).

Country: Spain

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Internet browsing, AutoCAD, maybe some photoshop.

Other details: I'm helping the mother of a friend with her computer. Lately she has been saying that her HP Pavillion All-in-one 24-xa0021ns is laggy. She lives in a different city, so I won't be able to do any work in person. Also, my first usual suggestion (reinstalling Windows from scratch) is not entirely possible at the time because some of her software licenses come from alternative sources and we cannot ensure that everything would be correctly restored. In this context, I suggested that she increases the current amount of RAM. Current specs are as follows: intel i7-9700T, 8 GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512 GB NVMe drive (at half capacity).

So my question is (I hope) fairly simple: should she go directly for 32 GB of RAM not to leave performance on the table, or staying at 16 GB gets her the most bang for the buck because there is no CPU bottleneck?

Thanks!

Penpilot · December 11, 2024

22 hours ago, Jmtzaguirre said:

So my question is (I hope) fairly simple: should she go directly for 32 GB of RAM not to leave performance on the table, or staying at 16 GB gets her the most bang for the buck because there is no CPU bottleneck?

if its a motherboard with 4 ram slots you could shoot for the middle you can just add a 2x8gb kit for a total of 24gigs. otherwise get a 32gig kit. ddr4, especially slower than 3200 should be cheap. ebay or the used market could have good deals.

another idea is getting a low end card like a310 or a380 or a LP 1660s or 1650 which should help with photoshop and AutoCAD. of course ram is the priority. maybe the CPU is thermal throttling? i bet the think has more dust than otherwise what should be physically possible.

Jmtzaguirre · December 11, 2024

1 hour ago, Penpilot said:

if its a motherboard with 4 ram slots you could shoot for the middle you can just add a 2x8gb kit for a total of 24gigs. otherwise get a 32gig kit.

It's an all-in-one with two SODIMM slots, so 32 GB it is. If I ever get to work on it, a can of compressed air and some fresh thermal paste will definitely be applied. Thank you for your advice!