Get the RAM upgrade, but don't expect double the speed.

No, it won’t double performance in memory-intensive tasks.

Here’s the deal: you’re going from 8 GB to 16 GB total, both running in dual-channel mode. The real benefit is capacity, not bandwidth. If your memory-intensive task was already fitting comfortably in 8 GB, adding more RAM does nothing for speed—dual-channel bandwidth stays the same. If your task was spilling into swap (using disk as memory), then the upgrade is massive. You go from painfully slow swapping to keeping everything in RAM. That can feel like 2x or more in that specific scenario.

But if the task was already fitting in 8 GB (e.g., a large spreadsheet that uses 6 GB), you’re just giving