What's best these days? 16Gb slow memory, or 8Gb fast

We're having a reshuffle of hardware, my partner is going to get a new (second hand) laptop for developer work, and I'll get their old one which is an 8 year old HP with an i5 (they had an i7 one, until a drink accident warranted a cheap replacement at short notice).

It's got 16Gb of ram stuffed into it, which is a mix of different clock speeds. Since I don't need to compile anything, is it better to have the higher clock speed, or more memory?

It'll be running some vanilla distro from an SSD, and I'll be using it for quite mundane activities - emulating 16-bit games, some photo manipulation with Gimp, and looking at porn.