I have a desktop pc with an i5-4460 processor with 8gb of ram on windows 7.

i have the desktop cpu widget, and i notice that often the ram usage gets to ~80%. i dont really game (i play some old steam games ie. cs:go), but i usually have netflix up on one screen and 20-30 firefox tabs on the other. and the computer becomes a bit slugggish when im moving between tabs or opening new ones. ps, not sure if this is relevant, but i dont have a graphics card.

is ram the bottleneck for me, or is it more the processor? thanks

Your CPU is perfectly fine and I wouldn't worry about that. Your 8GB RAM is probably fine too though tons of browsers can eat it up - shouldn't be an expensive upgrade given that you're probably talking DDR3 RAM (wouldn't pay more than $80 for a full 2x8GB set). Assuming you're using a solid state main drive too you're in good enough shape.

ram would help a lot, swapping to chrome might too. maybe consider an addon like The Great Suspender if you gotta have all them tabs open. But aside from being more secure than firefox, chrome also had recent updates to cut down ram usage from multi-tabs

I have 32GB and my primary storage are NVMe SSD.

I want things to be fast.

thanks for all the replies guys.

would an ssd really help me in terms of having multiple tabs open? i've had one previously, and for the tasks i do, i dont think it really made a significant difference iirc. sure ms word opened faster, and the pc booted up faster, but i dont really work with large databases or edit videos.

An SSD is only going to benefit on disk accesses, and then the difference over spinny disk and whether it matters will come down to what was accessed:
a) Page File because more than 8GB RAM was needed by the system and/or pages were sent to disk because they were stale but not explicitly removed and then suddenly were called on: this will matter *huge* and you *will* notice a difference - but it will still not beat raw physical memory.
b) large dataset read: like a game file for Skyrim or Call of Duty or FallOut: you may or may not care if it takes 10 seconds vs 25 seconds - some people do
c) continuous small stream reads from something like a SQL database - depends on how much is accessed and whether the database file is fragmented or not indexed correctly. If you multi-table a lot you will likely want the increase an SSD offers; but more memory will help as well as it puts the database into memory for much faster read/write.

i'd say ram before ssd. An SSD would help a little in your current situation, given that it sounds like you're running out of RAM and writing temp mem to your hard drive. An SSD would speed that up, but just getting more RAM would fix the problem in the first place.

Maps might load quicker in CS with an SSD, but that's about it.

he's not using large databases or doing video editing so i doubt this is the case. that he says in the OP that he only ever gets up to 80% only means he's going to have another 8 gig lying around gathering dust

yes, im "worried" this will be the case.

i guess my question is, my pc often reaches ~80% on ram usage, and switching between tabs feels sluggish, but is windows keeping ~20% spare? and would 16gb ram increase ram usage despite doing the same tasks?

You need to evaluate 'Available' vs 'Free' - free is the literal physical available while a available includes file cache that Windows will drop completely to make free. Free matters for speed.

It's almost impossible to give you an upgrade path that won't leave you some wasted capacity (at least a good percentage of the time), whether bumping up to 16GB or an SSD. That's just the nature of those components. If your need was related to graphics processing it would be much easier to dial in a card suggestion that fits your specific needs and budget.

I'd just point out that your CPU doesn't figure to the bottleneck anytime soon, and RAM/SSD upgrades aren't particularly expensive [however it could potentially require a new OS depending on your license]. Generally if you find your usage is starting to outrun your hardware, you might want to just drop a few bucks on upgrades. Either that or optimize better and adjust your usage a bit.

just invest in the RAM forget SSD for now


what do u have open in the tabs?


what RAM is in your system right now is it 1x8GB or 2x4GB or 4x2GB how many slots on mobo , ?

type msifno32 in search and screenshot the window info that opens.