Building a gaming rig - is 16GB ram essential?

thedoc46

thedoc46

thedoc46

Soldato
Joined
18 Jan 2003
Posts
5,995
Location
Expat in the USA
So, my old 4 yr Q6600 is going to be relegated to my spare PC, and in its place will be a new IB 3770k...

Prices are high ATM, on a lot of components. What was originally going to start off a GTX680 will now probably be a 7950, and memory I was originally going to get 16GB RAM, but thinking of dropping down to 8GB.

Is this a mistake for today's gaming? The extra 8Gb isn't too much compared to the rest of the components. But I do need to keep an eye on the budget so looking for places to cut back on.
 
Read somewhere that someone used a ramdisk (google it) and used this to improve BF3 performance.

It needed quite a bit of memory to get up and running and he'd upgraded to 16GB for this very reason. Me I think with 8GB you can just do away with your swap file, very few games are coded in 64bit so won't use anything past 4GB anyhow.

8GB is nice as it means you'll have room for the O/S and give the game as much of the 4GB it can read as possible...
 
From personal experience, I would hazard saying that 8Gb is now 'essential'. This was made clear to me in BF3 as a benchmark-title, where my 4Gb of memory simply wasn't enough to play the game smoothly and be able to minimize in/out to Windows. BF3 typically takes up about 2.0-2.5Gb of RAM itself, iirc, so 4Gb will be stretching it. Make 8Gb the 'essential' amount for any decent current build.
 
grimm said:
I'v got 6gb and no issues so far. Graphics card memory is important though, don't forget that.
Click to expand...

Yes, depending on screen res...

Gaming at 1080p or lower you'd not need anything past 2GB for your GPU.

Seems the sweet spot is 2GB GPU and 8GB system memory.

SSD is now essential for PC gaming I feel, makes load times so much quicker and the O/S boot within seconds..
 
I only have 6gb and haven't come across any problems due to lack of memory.
To be fair though I'm more of a casual gamer on the PC - Trine, Magicka, Orcs must Die, Plants vs Zombies and games like that, but also Fable 3, Splinter Cell Conviction, Just Cause 2.

I do play a good few RTS games though, stuff like Company of Heroes and the more recent Total War games, Civ 5, Dawn of War - I could keep going but my point is that those games can be intensive with lots of units doing lots of things on the screen at the same time and they run fine too.

The rest I play on my PS3 *runs out before the stoning begins*
 
Imo 8gb is essential 16gb is desireable. 16gb is overkill for most things, but its so damn cheap how can you say no? I picked up 16gb kingston dd3 1600mhz for £60+delivery. It would have been rude of me not to buy it at that price.

One thing i will say, running bf3 ultra +1080p with 8gb my pc was eating into the page file. Incredible hey.
 
iv-tecman said:
SSD is now essential for PC gaming I feel, makes load times so much quicker and the O/S boot within seconds..
Click to expand...

Let's not get carried away. An SSD is not essential at all.

As for RAM, 8GB will be absolutely plenty. I've got 12GB and it really makes no difference, the system has no idea what to do with the extra RAM most of the time so it just sits there empty.
 
TheVoice said:
Let's not get carried away. An SSD is not essential at all.

As for RAM, 8GB will be absolutely plenty. I've got 12GB and it really makes no difference, the system has no idea what to do with the extra RAM most of the time so it just sits there empty.
Click to expand...

Ok lets quantify when I meant..

Instead of spending on a GPU with more then 2GB or spending on an additional 8GB of memory, I’d consider any new PC gaming rig to essentially have an SSD as its boot device.

Fair comment, it ‘not’ essential however its maybe an essential consideration when putting together any new gaming rig. I know if I’d be looking for a new gaming rig today, I’d certainly put an SSD into the shopping basket, and 8GB of memory and a decent GPU with anything up to a max of 2GB of memory for 1080p gaming.
 
As far as a 'balanced' high-end system is concerned, yes. But PC gaming can be done on almost any spec of PC so it comes across as a little narrow-minded to say that a rather expensive luxury piece of hardware is 'essential'.
 
TheVoice said:
As far as a 'balanced' high-end system is concerned, yes. But PC gaming can be done on almost any spec of PC so it comes across as a little narrow-minded to say that a rather expensive luxury piece of hardware is 'essential'.
Click to expand...

To be fair, I was thinking of 'most' pc gamers buying a gaming rig wanting the 'best' for gaming and SSD is considered to be 'essential' in that regard.

Slight case of typing before fully thinking about every corner - so to speak..
 
iv-tecman said:
Ok lets quantify when I meant..

Instead of spending on a GPU with more then 2GB or spending on an additional 8GB of memory, I’d consider any new PC gaming rig to essentially have an SSD as its boot device.

Fair comment, it ‘not’ essential however its maybe an essential consideration when putting together any new gaming rig. I know if I’d be looking for a new gaming rig today, I’d certainly put an SSD into the shopping basket, and 8GB of memory and a decent GPU with anything up to a max of 2GB of memory for 1080p gaming.
Click to expand...

SSDs don't affect in-game performance at all (with the rare occasion where games load in the background scenery after you're in the in-game world and that shouldn't affect gameplay). Anyone prepared to put the amount of money needed for an SSD into a gaming machine should seriously consider putting that money towards a better GPU/CPU/RAM etc.

It's not worth sacrificing performance for the average 2 seconds extra it takes to load from an HDD. I have an SSD, I love it and I'd recommend them to anyone but they really actually don't affect gameplay in any way, unlike anything that improves your FPS.
 
iv-tecman said:
I’d consider any new PC gaming rig to essentially have an SSD as its boot device.
Click to expand...

Boot device yes, gaming no.

A pair of normal HDDs in raid 0 will be just as good for a gaming drive, and I have both Samsung Raid 0 F3s and a 512 Gb Crucial M4, and theres really not much difference when running games of each one.
 
ThomBassmonkey said:
SSDs don't affect in-game performance at all (with the rare occasion where games load in the background scenery after you're in the in-game world and that shouldn't affect gameplay). Anyone prepared to put the amount of money needed for an SSD into a gaming machine should seriously consider putting that money towards a better GPU/CPU/RAM etc.

It's not worth sacrificing performance for the average 2 seconds extra it takes to load from an HDD. I have an SSD, I love it and I'd recommend them to anyone but they really actually don't affect gameplay in any way, unlike anything that improves your FPS.
Click to expand...

I find my SSD a great help in-game, playing Red Orchestra and being one of the first to load gives you your choice of weaponry. But I would agree, GPUs/CPU/RAm comes first but once those are sorted the SSD is a good spend. And on the main point, 8GB is fine, 16 is pointless unless youre planning WAAAY ahead.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom