>4GB ram? Why?

I'm struggling with only 16gb my old system had 8gb so I thought double it would be sufficient. Now I have it I find it just as easy to use up to the extent I have to look into buying another 16gb+

Games not so much yet. Give it until mid 2014 and I think these new "launch" titles will push over the 4gb well and truely.

When it comes to working you can never have enough.
 
Iv only got 2GB in this machine but my laptop has 6 in. If i needed it id upgrade my laptop to 8 pretty easily but ddr2 is so expensive i won't upgrade my desktop until i get a new system really
 
My macbook pro had 4GB and ran out all the time and would slow to a crawl even doing rather mudane things. Stuck 16GB in it and don't need to worry now. Worthwhile investment if you ask me
 
I do a few things that require >8GB of RAM, multiboxing MMO clients you often need ~2GB available to each client instance plus something left for the OS and any other programs you have running and some of the software development stuff I do can swallow 8GB for the data lump while processing it to build the final package.
 
I probably don't need more than 4gb for my needs, but when I upgraded most of my system around a year ago, the price for 8gb was less than £25. I couldn't say no to that. I think things run a touch smoother, and the extra ram allows me plenty of headroom for future developments.
 
Right now my PC is idling at just under 2GB. This is with 8 tabs open on Firefox, a Bit Torrent client running and an AV running.
 
troops said:
I noticed no improvement at all from 8>16gb, but 4>8gb made things feel smoother.
Click to expand...

Really depends on what you're doing. =>4GB on a 32 bit system, word, browsing, VERY light gaming would be fine. Having 8GB is the sweet spot for running quite a few applications at the same time.

Currently stuck with 8GB, didn't think I needed more RAM until I started running multiple virtual machines at the same time.
 
With 16GB I often find myself using close to 8GB without an awful lot running. I use 4GB with just F@H and steam running!
 
I've been in nearly all the selections. 4GB just is not enough now days. You may find windows not using nearly all 4GB but this does not mean windows will not utilize more memory. 8GB is the sweet spot indeed from my experience. Going back in the days when most used 32bit systems , I jumped to 8GB DDR2 on a 64bit OS. The general useage improved and things were clearly better. The way windows can be greedy and hog ram , can help its day to day smoothness and snappiness.

I did originally have 16gb mem , but went to faster 2133 8GB set. The difference here was very minimal. Noticed a bit better with 16gb and pagefile disabled etc , but for most 8GB at a decent speed is more than enough and offers some environmental improvements around windows over 4GB.
 
In reference to Memory and Bill Gate's famous quote regarding memory....


I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit. It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within—oh five or six years people were complaining.
Smithsonian Institution interview (1993)

You may get away with 4GB but the more merrier.
 
Obviously the more the RAM the better for developers and those doing 3D modelling and rendering, as well as other memory intensive tasks (these kinds of applications see RAM and eat it and cache itself there).

However, even for general use (gaming included), the more RAM the better really as it is not wasted potential - Windows (not sure about Linux or Mac OS) will still dynamically allocate the memory depending on the tasks being done and thus the more memory you have the faster this process will be.

Also, theoretically, 16GB of RAM is the optimal amount for Windows 64-bit operating systems.
 
I managed to get 12GB of RAM for my i7 setup two years ago for circa £55

I thought about upgrading it to 24GB, until I saw that the price has doubled!

12GB is more than enough though
 
I upgraded to 16GB 2 years ago when memory prices bottomed out and I can't say I've ever used it. When I game it only really uses around 3-4GB, so when I upgrade I'm only going for 8GB but will leave space in case I do in the future require more memory.

MW
 
Memory requirements depend on software so there's no right or wrong answer to what someone required.

I can say however, between my 3 desktops and 1 laptop I have 72GB of DDR3 in use between them!
 
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