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Should I snatch up 16GB more RAM? (lemmy.zip)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
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So my specs are:

CPU: i5 12th Gen

GPU: 3070

RAM: 16GB

I’ve considered a number of options for upgrading, and adding some more RAM seems to be the simplest & cheapest option for the potential improvements; 8GB RAM chips seem to still be reasonably priced, I have 2 free RAM slots, performance would experience an objective increase, and it would perhaps allow me to start effectively using self-hosted AI systems instead of dropping $20/month on Claude. But…is this advisable, and is it really as simple as plugging the extra RAM in? It’s a homebuilt, but it’s been a good few years since I really fiddled around with the internals.

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[–] 3 points 1 week ago

I guess the options would be to either increase VRAM by replacing the 3070 (8GB VRAM), or adding system RAM. In all fairness, system RAM for local AI can be really slow, so token/s output benefits much more from VRAM. Then again, I guess upgrading to a 16GB VRAM card is more expensive. Any chance to snatch up a cheap used 16GB video card?

If you upgrade system RAM, be sure to get a set with similar capacity and speed as you currently have in your system to avoid problems.

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