8Gb vs 16Gb for Gaming?

Soldato
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I'm wondering if we have now reached a point where a gaming system should be equipped with 16Gb of ram de facto rather than the usual 8Gb which used to be plenty not so long ago?
 
Well any new system should be either Skylake or Haswell-E based which means DDR4. Since DDR4 is so cheap these days I see no reason not to go with 16GB of RAM to be honest. It's more than is really needed right now but it's cheap enough to not really be a big deal in my opinion.

I think it's better to get that amount right now to save the effort of having to track down a matching kit to upgrade from 8GB to 16GB at a later date, or worse still, having to replace the whole lot at a point when prices may even have increased.
 
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The issue I've got is, I've already got 8Gb of Samsung Green sitting underneath a NH-D14.

I've seen some Sammy Green's for sale in the MM, but would mean having to take that monster cooler off to install. Plus can't find the specialised screw driver that came with the cooler. :o
 
8GB is still fine. But 16GB is always what I go with now. I've found monitoring RAM usage in games such as BF4, my RAM usage can get close to 50%, which on 16GB is fine. But that would be pushing it on 8GB.
 
I'm wondering if we have now reached a point where a gaming system should be equipped with 16Gb of ram de facto rather than the usual 8Gb which used to be plenty not so long ago?

If you're referring to the latest Black Ops game requiring 16GB to run comfortably, then yes it appears as though 16GB should now become the minimum spec for a gaming PC. Having said that you'll still be fine on the majority of games with 8GB, for the time being at least. As Phemo mentioned, the price of RAM nowadays is cheap enough anyway you'd be a little foolish not to future proof yourself.
 
The recommended specs for some of the newer games is 16Gb. :eek:

Battle Front, COD BO3, AK.

Conversely AC Syndicate and Fall Out 4 are only 8Gb.

Maybe this is how we can tell what's a good and what's a bad console port form system ram requirements!

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On the flip side, would you bother to add more ram to a PC with a 3570k, when even this is 'under' the recommend CPU requirements?
 
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Im debating an upgrade too. It's cheaper to just get two more 4GB sticks and use all four of my ram slots but I heard this can cause issues sometimes. Would it be better on performance/stability to get 2x8GB sticks instead?
 
If I was building one now I may put 16GB in (my current one has 16GB) but if I had 8GB I would not add more. That said I'm still planning on putting 32GB in my build when I do it next year :D
 
8GB is fine if you turn off everything else in the background, but try leaving another application in the background almost always results in a "low on memory" errors and the game quitting to desktop.

Im debating an upgrade too. It's cheaper to just get two more 4GB sticks and use all four of my ram slots but I heard this can cause issues sometimes. Would it be better on performance/stability to get 2x8GB sticks instead?

Personally I found that 12gb was plenty if you can get that combination.
 
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The issue I've got is, I've already got 8Gb of Samsung Green sitting underneath a NH-D14.

I've seen some Sammy Green's for sale in the MM, but would mean having to take that monster cooler off to install. Plus can't find the specialised screw driver that came with the cooler. :o

I can remember using greens with a k2 cooler, very similar in size to the D14. Didn't have to remove the cooler to fit the ram as its so short. Team group Vulcan reds though slightly higher fitted without removing the cooler too.
 
Who cares about boot?? Do you play boot?? Is it a benchmark??

8gb is fine for most gaming

Odd, seems to be one of the things everyone likes about SSD's ;) No one plays benchmarks, who cares about benchmarks? It's all about the framez! ;)

In all seriousness though I thought there was a check on memory run at boot up that might be slower with a larger amount to check or is that a legacy thing?
 
I'm using 9gb now on gtav. That's on 1440p with fairly high settings though. That's the overall usage.

I would say 16gb to be safe.
 
As stated above with gta, monitoring it with after burner I was hitting 11gb and 14gb on shadow of mordor :o but I think that might of been a mem leak in the game
 
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