Is it overkill to buy 16GB of RAM to a gaming PC ? The price is almost the exact double, is it worth the price? I'm getting an Gt 660 2GB graphic card. The PC has an i7, 1 TB of Hd, and a 500 W power supply already.

 

There have been murmurings of games designed to make use of 16gb, but as for right now it's still overkill.

 

You certainly don't need 16GB now. You can get 2x4gb now, and then another 2x4gb later if you have 4 slots in your motherboard.

 

Your PC must be something beautiful to see. Unfortunately here the prices are usually 200% more expensive, so it's impossible to get a really high end PC, but I'm trying. I already have one 2gb Ram, can I use it with a 8gb one and make it a 10gb PC?

 

This. Just this. I have dreams of building a personal server with 128gb of RAM. I'm just too broke...

 

My PC uses ram that hasn't really been made for a while, so there just aren't many options for getting more, without selling a kidney.

I had 4gb and would have liked 16gb, but by the time I was ready to upgrade, I simply couldn't get enough ram without breaking the bank. I had to settle for 8. Of course, part of that was because I built my PC right before a shift in motherboard/ram architecture happened.

Buy as much as you reasonably can, and make sure it's a matching set.

 

Yes. Thanks, I already had a feeling I couldn't, so thanks for stopping me from doing something dumb.

 

Drop to an i5 with 8gb of ram and buy a 128 / 256 gb (whatever is affordable) ssd instead.

The performance increase will be 500x more noticeable than a slightly better cpu and double the ram (8gb is already plenty for everything except niche tasks like video editing)

 

You probably won't notice any performance boost game wise.
In fact, for majority of the games you will be disappointed. I think we all know how the first time you run the game, it runs slower, or when you enter some region in the game for the first time it takes longer to load etc.

The reason for that is that data is getting swapped from your hard drive to your RAM. That is EXTREMELY slow. (think, modern cpu's clock cycle is 0,5 nanosecond vs the time it takes for hard drive to start reading is around 6 ms on avg) Once it is in RAM it usually stays there for a long time, so the second time you load in a certain level of the game, the load in is faster.

By increasing your RAM, your just basically getting more space "to hold more levels" so to speak, but you still have to load them in initially. Also, not many games actually use that much RAM to begin with.

If I had money to burn, I would look into increasing the size of my cache, as on modern cpu's that will give you a big performance boost.

 

I already have the i7 1TB PC, but since the graphic card is shit and the RAM is kinda low for the new games, 2 x 4gb, I'm going to buy new ones. An GTX Geforce 660 and I was in a doubt, 8 or 16, do I came here for advice. The 16 will just make my budget. So I know very little about ssd, but they seem to be horribly expensive and have a short memory.

 

You might want to use a power supply calculator. I don't know your computers complete set-up but it's possible you could be going over or close to 500W's.

KaiDASH is right. You will feel a noticeable difference in the speed of your computer but it also comes with having to transfer your current OS and all files to the new SSD. (Getting more RAM is still recommended.)

You can get around the high price by getting a 120GB SSD while keeping the 1TB for storage (Increased power consumption). With regular use they can last 10+ years.

 

SSDs are expensive for the capacity, but they're used for their IOPS - I/O operations per second. An average hard drive will hit ~100, maybe a little more but no higher. Pretty much any bog standard SSD will hit ~4,000 on common end user tasks, and can stretch up to 100,000 for the high performance extreme stress scenarios depending on model and firmware.

As for the amount of RAM, it's dependent on what else you do while gaming. Gaming itself doesn't use that much RAM, you can get by with 4GB. This becomes a problem when you want to leave other programs open in the background and for the most part, you probably won't have any issues with 8GB. If you're having issues with 8GB of RAM, you're not 'just' gaming - you've got other things going on.

As for power supply, you will be hard pressed to hit 400+ with a single GPU system, regardless of other factors. Beyond the CPU and GPU, the only other major factors would be hard drives and fans but you'd run out of connectors long before the power supply is stressed. If you are having a problem with power with the setup described, it's because the power supply itself is poor quality, not because of capacity.