Have a Dell PC that I use daily to work from home, it's an Inspiron 3670, I7-8700 with 12gb ram. Keep getting messages that I'm using much of the ram daily almost 10mb of the 12mb constantly.

Figured it was time to upgrade, ram isn't expensive. The box has two UDIMM slots, it's dual channel DDR4, 2400 and 2666 mhz, supports up to a total of 32mb

Decided to take it to the max, ordered Crucial Ram 32GB kit DDR4 3200mhz but it will clock down to 2666mhz Obligatory Link

Question, will the machine and ram auto clock to 2666mhz or will I need to do anything in the PC settings to tell it what mhz.. Haven't googlized that question yet, wondered what the IT gurus of SF thought... before I put it in the box.

quote:

I7-8700

it should set speed by SPD automaticly and clock down to the chipset max speed.

Generally you can change the memory speed in the BIOS but unless you are getting a specific error ~ there is no need to do anything (manually) with it.
The RAM will be backward compatible.
Generally, the memory speed is over-clocked by gamers who can benefit from the speed and of course the MB BIOS must support it.

A dell would not have overcloking available in the limited BIOS

If you are working your PC that hard you could perhaps benifit of a full system upgrade, either current Intel or AMD would be considerably faster than an 8th gen I7

quote:

Originally posted by MoosehornMan:
A dell would not have overcloking available in the limited BIOS

Like I said "IF" the BIOS supports it.
I build with mostly Gigabyte and Asus Motherboards and not all support it ~ depends on the chipset, CPU and memory itself.
But overall the OP shouldn't need to do anything.

quote:

Originally posted by MoosehornMan:
If you are working your PC that hard you could perhaps benifit of a full system upgrade, either current Intel or AMD would be considerably faster than an 8th gen I7

I don't think filling up 10 or 12GB of RAM is necessarily working a computer "hard". Sure, many CPU intensive activities also benefit from big RAM numbers (video editing, Photoshop, gaming), but the OP might actually just be on the opposite end of the spectrum and just has his RAM bogged down with bloatware running in the background and a couple of dozen browser tabs.

Just checked mine & I'm at 11/16GB used. No appreciable impact on performance.
3 RDP sessions, SQL, ERP and half dozen Brave tabs, plus Outlook & Teams, and displaying on 3 monitors.

Unfortunately, the RAM isn't easily accessible on my machine, I think it's under the keyboard.

At one point and time I flipped to task manager playing Star Citizen and caught it using something like 38GB out of my 64GB total RAM.

But it should auto down clock. Typically plug and play from my experience.

Right now my work machine us using 10GB out of 16GB. Teams, mail, a dozen tabs open, skype, some word docs... etc.

Well, it's in, went fine, I've done plenty of these installs, and others over the years, machine clocked it properly and now everything is flying compared to before, it's still at 9gb with zero applications open.

$70 well spent for a few minutes of work, and I got to dust around the PC and clean up the work area!

Daily run several excel sheets, outlook, multiple windows to files I have to access, Acrobat, Stamps.com, HP Scanner software.

Outside of that whatever windows is running in the background.

Heres the top users of RAM

Thought it would be interesting to compare browsers use, each is open, one tab to SF Lounge