>4GB ram? Why?

When going from 4GB to 8GB many years ago, I also noticed that paging essentially stopped, when with only 4GB the hard disk would be active a lot more of the time.

It's definitely worth it, and you will see that if you upgrade.
 
Well, I've gone from 4gb to 6gb and see little/no difference. Games for example never seem to take it beyond about 40-50% memory usage.

The only way I can get huge usage is to use Photoshop and open lots of images.
 
I bought 2x8gb because I want to be able to completely fill my ram slots on my z87 later on, maybe 32gb will be the norm. Running a ram disk is also sweet.
 
NeilFawcett said:
OK, my 5yr old machine has 4GB in it... To this day I don't think I've ever seen it more than about 70-80% full... and is typically less than that.

That said, I'm not a huge gamer, but I've got a number of recent titles etc so I have played modern (bigger) games. eg: Max Payne 3.

So people with 8GB of 16GB, surely most of it is sitting there unused? Or am I missing something? If I've yet to use anywhere near 4GB how have people made use of 8GB or 16GB?
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If your not using it don't upgrade, but for specialist applications such as VM's, CAD, photoshop processing there is a need for 8GB and in some cases 16GB of RAM for sure.
 
I have 4GB (well 3.3GB if you take into account 32-bit windows) and memory usage when gaming regularly tops 88-90% causing games to freeze up.

Civ 5 was a particular bug bear when I first got it and resulted in having to pretty much turn off all other programs in order to get decent performance from it.
 
At home 8 GB is plenty for the usual media/browser/games at the moment, I will see what happens with newer games once the next gen consoles are released.

At work however I need at least 8GB preferably closer to 16GB. I can have upwards of 3 instances of visual studio open, Multiple browsers, different VM's. These will easily eat up any and all available memory. That said there have been big advances in the efficiency of these programs, but I always spec 16GB minimum for a dev machine now.
 
I'm guessing it's a similar reason why aircraft normally take-off with much more fuel than they need. Most of the time it's just going to sit in the tank doing nothing....but now and then they might have to divert and will need a huge chunk of that extra fuel.

I have 8GB so I can circle above Washington for 8 hours whilst John McClane sorts the terrorists out.
 
i originally ran 4gb of ram but then had massive stutter issues with bf3 so bought a cheap 8GB Kingston genesis kit on special, later got rid of my 4gb and got another 8GB, cant say i've looked back being able to turn paging off has prolonged the health of my ssd plus to run older smaller games I use a ramdisk which gives me blisteringly fast load times plus i'll often use the ramdisk if want to test out a new os via virtualisation
 
some ram may be reserved/cache for various things so in some circumstances you may never actually observe 100% physical ram usage in practice. The only way to tell if you are at the limitation of your ram is to watch the paging file, use perfmon to monitor the usage of the paging file, if it creeps up you could probably do with some more ram, if it sits at a few percent its fine. Some usage isn't always indicative of a problem though, you can monitor the page faults /sec and page reads /sec and if you have high numbers for those and paging file usage then you would definitely benefit from more ram.
 
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Chicken #16 said:
I'm guessing it's a similar reason why aircraft normally take-off with much more fuel than they need. Most of the time it's just going to sit in the tank doing nothing....but now and then they might have to divert and will need a huge chunk of that extra fuel.

I have 8GB so I can circle above Washington for 8 hours whilst John McClane sorts the terrorists out.
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Don't look up the truth on the 'extra' fuel they carry, it may stop you flying :)
 
breadturbo said:
Don't look up the truth on the 'extra' fuel they carry, it may stop you flying :)
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So true.
Carrying extra fuel costs a lot of money so guess what they don't.
Also if they get into a holding pattern waiting to land they just declare fuel emergency and get priority.

Trouble is with so many airlines doing this there will come a time when they do literally fall out of the SKY from lack of fuel.

The fines for taking off with insufficient fuel are small and the money saved by breaking the rules is large.
 
mmorpg "the secret world" likes a lot of ram, players who report bad performace get a big boost from going from 4 to 8 gigs, i have 6 gigs and i use 66% of that while playing and doesnt budge more than 2% each way so makes sense!
 
Windows only uses page file when it needs to.

I had 16GB and would typically see 1-2GB of page file. This is on a development machine, SQL server instances etc

I now have 32GB, still have page file enabled, and performance monitor shows no page file in use. I read somewhere that Windows uses page file regardless, but it's not happening in my case of 32GB.

My advice always leave page file on, but check how much page file your using on performance monitor from administrator tools. Don't let it make say 8GB when typically your only say using 1GB.
 
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Minstadave said:
Using 4.7GB with just a browser, mail and BF3 open.
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This is exactly why I plan on getting some more RAM in my system - I reguarly have many Internet windows open and it really struggles.

Be looking at 4gb (1 of) to tide me over then plan to get an 8gb piece when time allows after my XBOX1 arrives ;)
 
I had 32gb, but I removed 16gb to move into another system when I couldn't actually find a use for it.

I've also recently decided to specialise my machines a lot more. I don't think I will install development tools or SQL server on my gaming machine anymore.
 
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