8GB vs 16GB

bobbarley · 26 Sep 2011 at 16:43

With memory prices being so cheap at the moment it seems a fair few are grabbing the opportunity to jump up to 8GB in their systems. I'm just curious whether anyone thinks it's worth spending another £40 or so and going up to 16GB?

16GB seems a little like over kill at the moment, but how long do you think it'll be until we're using that much memory for day to day activities. With it being so cheap I guess it would fall under the category of "nice to have" at the moment unless one does any serious music/photo editing.

How many of you crazy people have gone for 16GB?

Deluxe1 · 26 Sep 2011 at 16:48

I went for 16GB purely because of the price.

minimadmotorman · 26 Sep 2011 at 17:52

I went for 16gb purely because it was so cheap.

Scon · 26 Sep 2011 at 17:54

bobbarley said:
how long do you think it'll be until we're using that much memory for day to day activities.

Never.

steve45 · 26 Sep 2011 at 17:55

same here, bought 16gb of corsair vengeance last week, the 8gb of xms3 i have in my system will go in the system i'm putting together for my mother.
i thought at that price, why the hell not! i dont plan on getting rid of this system in the foreseeable future, i may not need it now but whats to say a year or 2 down the line i wont???

Adsta · 26 Sep 2011 at 19:13

I bought 16gb cuz it was cheap on today's daily

HeX · 26 Sep 2011 at 19:23

Got 16GB because, well... for £40 why not...

Krislord · 26 Sep 2011 at 19:49

I went from 4GB to 16GB and after selling my old RAM it cost a net £45. This motherboard, CPU and RAM will last me for years to come, so I'd rather spend the small amount now when its so cheap than wait even 18 months and have to pay more.

Scougar · 26 Sep 2011 at 20:06

HeX said:
Got 16GB because, well... for £40 why not...

£40 !!! holy cow.

eddiew · 27 Sep 2011 at 09:38

I was regularly seeing 6.5-7 gig in use so 8 wasn't really a comfortable amount for me

iostream · 27 Sep 2011 at 14:06

eddiew said:
I was regularly seeing 6.5-7 gig in use so 8 wasn't really a comfortable amount for me

I take it you are doing lots of photo/video editing? Windows 7 uses all my 8GB, but most of it is just cached..

Invictus · 27 Sep 2011 at 14:15

I think the days are numbered for ram. We will see storage and ram meet so the only differentiators will be cpu and gpu caches.
PC gaming is not progressing computer development to the extent that we need 16GB so memory suppliers will focus on giving us speed and not huge capacities.
The only reason to have large ram capacities is when your creating content and only because storage is the largest bottleneck.

pat_c · 27 Sep 2011 at 16:01

burrell said:
Never.

lol Never say Never

I remember MS setting the HW requirements for NT then XP, then Vista so much more than the previous generation because the H/W was 'affordable'.

mrk · 28 Sep 2011 at 14:24

I require 16Gb for day to day activities. My Lightroom and Photoshop workings use up to 7GB of RAM at times and then there's the standard background apps and stuff being used.

Anyway, I upgraded from 8GB and noticed a a difference in the way my photo editing apps behave, things load faster on long sessions and there's virtually no disk caching at all. Also when copying large files in Windows everything can cache to RAM for the transfer whereas before it would cache partially to RAM until the pagefile was required.

It's so cheap now anyway so just go 16

shaffaaf27 · 29 Sep 2011 at 22:34

64kb ram is more than enough

wkingsnorth · 29 Sep 2011 at 22:37

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Seriously though, I've stayed on 8gb because I've never seen more the 75% use of that so it'd be a waste of money to get more

Azarathal · 29 Sep 2011 at 22:57

75% use of 8gb? I rarely see that on my 4gb kit, is this gaming or actual work?

KNiVES · 29 Sep 2011 at 23:10

I went for 8GB of fast ram (Corsair Vengeance at 1872mhz). It's tempting to go 16GB but I don't think I'll need it just yet, I only ever run one thing at a time.

Flashheart · 1 Oct 2011 at 21:36

Just bought 16gb for a new build, not sure ram will get any cheaper but it may get more expensive!

Admetos · 2 Oct 2011 at 19:40

Windows 7 will pre-fetch data it thinks you may need into standby memory. I have 16GB ram and often see just a few mb left, yet only have 6-7gb in actual use. If applications do need this memory, then standby (cached) memory is released. So even with 16GB or more memory, providing the computer is left on long enough to pre-fetch, it's never really wasted memory.