Real-world tests beat synthetic benchmarks for RAM upgrades.

Do both, but trust your actual workloads more.

Run a synthetic memory benchmark like AIDA64 Cache & Memory, Geekbench, or PassMark before and after the swap. These give you clean, repeatable numbers for bandwidth and latency. Screenshot the results. That’s your objective data.

But the real question is whether your day-to-day apps get faster. Time something you actually do: how long to open a giant spreadsheet, compile a project, load a game level, or apply a filter in Photoshop. If those times drop noticeably, the upgrade was worth it even