What's the relationship between CPU, RAM and performance?

Solution 1:

Your CPU is capable of addressing the full 8 GiB.

However, that does not mean that it will become faster. It is likely that performance will improve though.

Maybe it will help if you imagine the CPU as a car and the RAM as the trunk of the car. Increasing the trunk size (or moving to a pickup truck) might help you move stuff from A to B if you need less trips. However, if everything fits happily in one small trunk then you will not see an advantage.

In the laptop/Windows case, it is slightly more complex. Your OS will use potentially unused memory as disk cache, which will make the computer faster in time. It will, however, not suddenly become faster at all tasks.

Solution 2:

The Intel i5s are 64bit CPUs and thus can utilize more than 4GB RAM. If your question was more aimed at whether it would make sense to upgrade RAM on a weak machine then this would depend on the software you run on it. In general, more memory is beneficial. However, whether it makes sense upgrading in your case can not be answered by anyone else but you.

Things you need to consider:

• Do you monitor your memory usage on a regular basis and realized that your free memory is always low?

• Do you run your operating system without swap file and experience low memory warnings?

• Do you plan on running applications that require more memory than what you have available?

If so then upgrading would make sense. If you only want to upgrade because you have the feeling it would improve your performance, but can't really tell how much of your memory is utilized on a regular basis then you might end up being disappointed. I suggest using memory monitoring tools to get an idea of how much memory you need at times. If you experience heavy swapping then upgrading might make sense.