Worth going up to 16g of ram

You would notice a performance increase if you put is a Sata3 SSD or a newer video card or if you just had 2gb of ram and were upgrading to 8gb , but since games don't go past 8gb and windows 7 does love ram there is a point to where it's just not being used unless you have a specific application that weill take advantage of large amounts of ram. I have even read somewhere that its not a good thing to fill all the ram slots.
However where ram is so cheap and you just never know what is around the corner , since it's your money and your computer if you want to have 16gb of ram in it you absolutely can. Just make sure that if you are getting another 8gb that it is exactly the same everything (settings , speed , timings and model) because sometimes ram can be fickel and not want to work together. You could sell the 8gb you have on e-bay or something and get a full 16gb matched set. As long as you are aware that you will not see a performance increase you will be fine.

I am pondering the opposite, i had 6gb and upgraded with an 8gb set giving me 12gb. As you stated DDR3 ram is so cheep now much more that when i purchased my ram, i purchased another 8gb set. I now have two sets of F3-10600CL9D-8GBNT running in my Gateway and am wondering if i need to remove one set and run only 8gb or even remove it all and go back to the 6gb that came in the computer. The reason is, i have not seen any difference in performance between the 6gb and 16gb, just have $100 less in my bank account. I have read the same about not filling all slots with the sandbridge system, the tech at G.Skill site just said my system will use the excess ram memory as cache and will not effect the performance, cpuz shows my memory running at 665.3 mhz so they are not clocking back with all the 4 modules installed.

How? How could you add 8gb to 6gb and get 12gb?

You failed to mention what cpu and motherboard your talking about and you haven't told us what configuration so it doesn't make sense how you could. What are these 2gb sticks, 4gb sticks, 8gb sticks?? If you upgraded from 3x2g sticks in triple channel mode to 2x4gb sticks in dual channel mode then you have more ram running less bandwidth.

Sorry, my computer is a Gateway DX4850-27e, Intel i5-2300 with a Gateway/Acer motherboard windows 7 64 bit. The computer came with 6gb 's of DDR3 ram two 2gb sticks and two 1gb sticks. To get 12gb i installed the two 4gb G.Skill sticks and the two 2gb sticks that came in the computer.

It would be a complete waste considering your probably not even using the 8gb that you have now.

You could do something with another 8GB of RAM like use it as a RAM disk but it would not directly effect performance. More RAM generally doesn't improve performance outside of situations in which you are running low on memory capacity.

try better overclocking, you can push the multiplier to 45 (and beyond) with a bit of tweaking, just make sure you have a good aftermarket cooler (consider a watercooling loop)

maybe RAID your SSD, overclock your GPU, get another one for SLI/Crossfire... it really depends on what VGA you have, since all the other parts you mentioned seem fairly 'up-to-date' and haven't improved by much.

You guys are talking about stressing the memory controller on the CPU and slowing down performance via filling all 4 slots. Tomshardware did an article about DDR3 Kits a while back where they saw 8GB across 4 slots doing worse than 4gb across 2 slots. (In a game) Games rarly use more than 4gb, over 8gb is a waste of money. Just get like a different cooler or somthing else to mess with.

You could get 8 more gbs of ram and use it as ram cache or a ram disk.

Best answer selected by madmonkeymusic.