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@hazelnot@sunbeam.city...huh I think the weird slowdowns and freezes I get is cause I have 16GB of RAM and the swap partition is on an HDD (didn't want to place too much stress on the new and expensive SSD I got 
)
I should probably upgrade my RAM but moni
Is it true that using all four RAM slots causes instability?
Also that all DIMMs have to be the exact same model?
Another thing is, I'm not even sure how worth it it would be to get a DDR4 RAM upgrade considering DDR5 is a thing now, but I also can't really afford to upgrade my motherboard too (especially since then I'd probably have to upgrade my CPU as well 
)
Oof yeah someone told me to buy it second-hand cause "brand new isn't worth the investment" 
Wtf that person now told me that it would be more worth it to get a 120GB SSD instead and use it as swap, but that sounds really weird and someone I know told me that's completely ridiculous
lol yeah ok the person who told me I should just get a 120GB SSD instead of buying RAM is now going on about "RAM mitigations" for cyberattacks and how "if you hear an HDD "just doing its work" get ready to make backups cause the motor is failing" cause they're convinced that any noise from an HDD = it's dying or some shit
Like call me naive but I Really don't care about RAM mitigations or whatever, I'm not a company or a fugitive from the law (and even if I was one, I hopefully wouldn't keep anything important and incriminating on the goddamn immobile desktop PC) and who's gonna break into my house while my PC is running *and* I'm away to... steal my RAM? Or specifically target me with a remote cyberattack that can actually dump my RAM and send it somewhere else?
Maybe I should just try to cut down on RAM usage even more, someone told me 16GB is still a lot and they get by on 8GB, but lately I've been rubbing up against that limit more and more to the point where the very slow HDD swap can't keep up anymore and the PC basically freezes :<
@hazelnot Uh yeah that's just weird. Personally I have a small swap file on my root partition and set my computer to swap only if absolutely necessary.
@ridge I have swap on an HDD to not kill the SSD but... yeah, idk, I want to upgrade my RAM, but people are telling me it's not worth it unless I get a new motherboard that can use DDR5
@hazelnot Really? DDR4 RAM is getting pretty cheap at least around here, you don't have to go balls to the wall all in one go.
I don't see why you can't throw in some extra DDR4 RAM now and upgrade to a DDR5 platform later.. When you're done with the RAM, you could maybe save it for later to use in a hobby project, or just give it to someone else.
Also don't worry about using all four DIMM slots. Yes, there are cases where it can introduce issues, but to my understanding this is for people who push their RAM to the limit with stupid overclocks. I've used four slots without issue on an AM4 budget motherboard in the past.
If you're swapping a lot, I would personally just consider reducing swappiness, and keep the swap file on your SSD. I have my swap file at /swap and that's on a PCIe 4.0 SSD. No worries really.
I don't know what you're doing that would exhaust 16GB RAM because in casual use that's still a lot in my eyes, so maybe that'll help.
@ridge I usually just, use Firefox, and have a bunch of Electron-based apps open (Discord, Element, Steam)
Sometimes like 2-3 tabs will use 4GB of RAM, depending on the website. And I usually have like 20 tabs open
I've only lately started not doing that cause I've been running out of RAM faster and faster
@hazelnot Yep, that makes sense actually... Everything is browsers now. Beloathed Electron.
Well, I wish you luck, and don't let the techbro get you down. Can never have enough RAM.
@ridge Thanks
@hazelnot wannabe infosec people are the worse lmao
@tully now he's telling me that if you can hear a WD Blue working it means it's less than a month away from failing
I've had this drive for somewhere around 5-10 years and I've *always* been able to hear it lmfao
@hazelnot the annoying thing is that there _is_ a kernel of truth to this stuff. if a HDD starts making _unusual_ noises then yes, it's very close to death and you need to back it up ASAP.
but the usual crunching and thrashing from random access patterns is not one of those unusual sounds! that's a normal HDD sound for anything that isn't a single sequential read or write operation! and a really annoying number of people don't seem to understand that.
@hazelnot Oh this person is hilarious actually
@ridge yeah they also told me that an HDD shouldn't be any louder than the background noise of the case fan and that if you can hear a WD Blue at all you should prepare for it to die within a month
I've had this HDD for I think about a decade and I've been able to hear it working for as long as I've had it lmao
@hazelnot apparently a bunch of modern processors will only run with all slots filled if you turn the ram clock speeds down
@timmy Yeah that's what I heard too
@hazelnot I don't believe so, no. Most motherboards I've seen recently, though, assume that slots 1 and 3 are the same model and that 2 and 4 are the same, but not necessarily that 1 and 2 are the same.
Please take with a grain of salt, in any case.
@hazelnot Not in my experience.
Ideally atleast have 2x2 sets that match, but normally you should be able to run whatever mix, at the slowest speed of them all.
Ofcourse, not all motherboards are the same... so YMMV.
@hazelnot my first prebuilt PC had two different size DDR3 sticks and ran fine for whatever that's worth. Like all the issues it did have weren't RAM related.
@mitsunee lol fair, might be another reddit gamer myth
@hazelnot I'd check if there's any more differences but my (then) bf went "can I have those" and I went "oh sure", so I haven't seen that RAM in half a decade