Ram amount or overclocking

[Niami]

I'm not good at planning builds but for ryzen 5 2600 is it better to have 16gb of ram or a better cooler to overclock? I know these are very unrelated but I'm planning a build for gaming and some light content creation and I am trying to squeeze everything I can from my budget so I'm not sure what's better. 

[minervx]

it's task dependent.  if we're specifically talking about getting 144 hz in games, probably a better cooler.   but in the grand scheme of things, a cooler can only do so much for a cpu, and 16 gb ram is good to have long term.

 

a good aftermarket cooler helps, but dont get a high end cooler if it means sacrificing in other areas

[Cereal5]

2 minutes ago, minervx said:

it's task dependent.  if we're specifically talking about getting 144 hz in games, probably a better cooler.   but in the grand scheme of things, a cooler can only do so much for a cpu, and 16 gb ram is good to have long term.

 

a good aftermarket cooler helps, but dont get a high end cooler if it means sacrificing in other areas

But if you RAM while in game, then it would have been more beneficial to have 16GB, because your frame rate will be significantly lower if you're using pagefile.

[Crunchy Dragon]

2 minutes ago, minervx said:

if we're specifically talking about getting 144 hz in games, probably a better cooler.

The stock cooler should still be fine, especially if it can handle overclocks to 4Ghz on the Ryzen chips.

 

8 minutes ago, Niami said:

I'm not good at planning builds but for ryzen 5 2600 is it better to have 16gb of ram or a better cooler to overclock? I know these are very unrelated but I'm planning a build for gaming and some light content creation and I am trying to squeeze everything I can from my budget so I'm not sure what's better. 

Stock cooler will last you a while, get the RAM instead. I have my Ryzen 5 1600 running at 3.8Ghz on the stock cooler, and two cores are at a fairly high usage 24/7. No thermal issues whatsoever.

[paddy-stone]

In this particular case I would say the ram would be better spent, especially higher freqency 3000-3200Mhz, as the 2600 has a pretty good base frequency anyway and will go higher on single core with boost.

But just to be clear, you don't need a mega expensive cooler anyway for overclocking. I have a coolermaster ML240-lite and is an awesome cooler especially for the price.

[brob]

16GB of memory instead of 8GB will contribute more to overall system performance than a few 100MHz of cpu clock.