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I have an HP OMEN 15-en0003ns laptop with 16GB RAM I use for editing video. It came with 2 Samsung M471A1K43DB1-CWE 8GB SODIMM DDR4 3200MHz memories. I've recently been gifted 2 Kingston FURY Impact KF318LS11IBK2 8GB SODIMM DDR3 1866MHz memories for my birthday. Now, right off the bat I would think it's obvious that going from 3200MHz to 1866MHz would be a step down BUT checking the price for both memories I see the Samsung ones are a lot cheaper than the Kingston Fury ones... So is that just a brand thing or are the Kingston Furys better in any other meaningful way?

Should I change my Samsung memories for the Kingston Furys or am I better off with the Samsung ones and I should sell the Furys and buy something else?

Other specs of my Omen:

  • AMD Ryzen 7 4800H
  • Nvidia GTX 1650-Ti
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2 Answers 2

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It is highly unlikely your RAM is going to make a significant difference in the performance for video editing or encoding. Your CPU, then GPU is most likely to be the bottleneck in this scenario (in that order).

While you don't list the CAS latency for the RAM, It is essentially certain that loading the DDR3 RAM is going to be slower for overall performance in the laptop.

Memory response time is calculated as (cas_latency/freq) * 1000. (e.g. 15/3200*1000 = 4.7 ns). You can use this to compare RAM differing in frequency and CAS latency. In general, the higher frequency RAM is probably going to better if you can't be bothered to calculate.

I would however suggest more RAM up to 16 gb as some software can make use of the extra space, make paging to hard disk less likely, and reduce CPU load from RAM compression. These factors would increase performance slightly.

Expanding the size of available memory would probably be the best use of available funds in this scenario, but would only yield marginal improvements.

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  • Thanks a lot for your answer! Especially for it not just being X is better, but actually taking the time to explain and give me those formulas that'll help me choose a better memory in the future! I hadn't even realised that the new memories were DDR3 and not DDR4 (not that I knew what that meant, but could've guessed 4 is better than 3, somehow XD ). Anyway, it's as I suspected. Last month I tried putting 64Gb RAM in my Omen, but it didn't help at all, as you said. In fact, it made it slower. Probably because it was clocking at 2666 as it needed enabling XMP, which isn't supported by my Omen.
    – QuestionerNo7
    Commented Jul 26, 2021 at 10:06
  • @QuestionerNo27 Amd uses another name for the memory speeds. try looking for docp
    – skippy
    Commented Jul 27, 2021 at 7:42
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If you're currently using the Samsung modules, that means your laptop uses DDR4. The DDR3 modules you've been gifted will neither work nor physically fit.

Sell (or return) the Kingston DDR3 modules and get some extra DDR4 modules if you have RAM slots left unused in your laptop. If you only have two RAM slots, you'd want to get 2x16 GB modules, preferably at 3200 MHz too, like the M471A2K43DB1-CWE.

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  • Thanks for the reply! Yeah, silly me, I focused on everything else but completely missed that the new memories were DDR3 and not 4... feels silly I can't return them, as they were bought some time back and only just brought over, now that travel bans are lifted. I'm gonna try and sell them, hopefully without too much loss. And see what I can get. As I mentioned to the above commenter, I tried putting in some 64Gb RAM a couple of months back but nothing changed for the better; in fact, it seemed a little worse. Perhaps the MHz was the issue. But, really, for editing RAM is not the main issue.
    – QuestionerNo7
    Commented Jul 27, 2021 at 11:53

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