8 GB still enough?

Midlife Crisis · 8 Jun 2014 at 09:38

Upgrade time soon, so as the title says is 8 GB of memory still going to cut it?.
Pc will be a gaming machine mainly. I could probably reuse the Corsair Vengeance low profile ram in my current Phenom machine but I guess that a Z97 i7 machine would benefit from some faster ram?. 8 or 16 GB speck me.

Combat Fighter · 8 Jun 2014 at 10:09

I'm using 6gb and that does the job for me fine running windows 8 and playing battlefield 4 @1440p ultra settings. So I don't see 8gb being a problem.

I also use Photostop, Lightroom, Quarkxpress and plenty more on a regular basis.

My i920 system is years old now though and if building a new system today I'd put 16gb in there as it's so cheap to do so. So what if you don't use it all!

Midlife Crisis · 8 Jun 2014 at 11:13

Yes for a little extra it will not do any harm

Draeger · 8 Jun 2014 at 11:23

I went from 6gb XMS3 to 16gb Vengeance in my i7 920 system recently. No real difference in gaming apart from perhaps faster load times between levels etc. But the whole PC feels much zippier, opening folders and programs is noticeably faster. I use CS6 and have multiple windows open in Fireworks and Photoshop and again the speed increase when working with these is very obvious.

Games wise, 16gb won't make too much of a difference but if you are carrying out certain memory intensive tasks regularly then in my opinion going to 16gb is worthwhile, especially as Combat Fighter says the price of RAM is currently still pretty good.

Combat Fighter · 9 Jun 2014 at 22:24

Draeger said:
I went from 6gb XMS3 to 16gb Vengeance in my i7 920 system recently. No real difference in gaming apart from perhaps faster load times between levels etc. But the whole PC feels much zippier, opening folders and programs is noticeably faster. I use CS6 and have multiple windows open in Fireworks and Photoshop and again the speed increase when working with these is very obvious.

Games wise, 16gb won't make too much of a difference but if you are carrying out certain memory intensive tasks regularly then in my opinion going to 16gb is worthwhile, especially as Combat Fighter says the price of RAM is currently still pretty good.

Interesting that you say that. Might get 16gb just for the fun of it as I have not upgraded the internals (apart from gfx) for years!

Plus I do use quite a few memory intensive applications.

What memory sticks did you go for?

Also I presume that also means your running in dual channel instead of tri? (2x8gb)

abbotsmike · 9 Jun 2014 at 22:28

My current system has 8GB, but if I were to upgrade (or when I build my server) then I'll probably go to 16. It's not much more and i've gotten close to running out with 8 in the past (generally through trying to do too many things at the same time!) It's not normally a problem though.

Draeger · 9 Jun 2014 at 22:57

Combat Fighter said:
Interesting that you say that. Might get 16gb just for the fun of it as I have not upgraded the internals (apart from gfx) for years!

Plus I do use quite a few memory intensive applications.

What memory sticks did you go for?

Also I presume that also means your running in dual channel instead of tri? (2x8gb)

Check THIS THREAD I started a couple weeks ago on the subject. Most X58 based systems can run in 'Flex Mode' with 4 sticks of RAM fitted which gives you Triple Channel mode as normal for the first three sticks and the 4th stick runs in a type of single channel mode. There are images in the above thread describing it and what slots the RAM sticks need to go in.

I went for Corsair Vengeance, 4x 4Gb Sticks of CMZ16GX3M4A1600-C9, THIS STUFF. The only issue I had was that the 3rd and 4th sticks fouled the Coolermaster Hyper 612S heat sink because of the ridiculous heat spreaders on the RAM. I simply removed the heat sinks on the 3rd and 4th sticks carefully as they are not required, especially if you aren't overclocking your memory which I'm not.

mightymouse · 10 Jun 2014 at 18:00

8GB is sufficient although higher speeds can't hurt especially if you are planning to overlook later.

Annihilation · 24 Jun 2014 at 16:58

Speed isn't really going to make huge differences but if you are buyin anyway might as well get the best you can.

On Holiday · 24 Jun 2014 at 17:12

Depends entirely what you're running.

If I wasn't using software like VMWare Workstation, Video/image editing then I would probably make do with 8Gb.

I wouldn't spend the money unless you really need to.

Ploppy2k3 · 24 Jun 2014 at 18:04

yup agree.

unless video editing professionally or running Hyper-V/VMWare its not worth it really.

Admetos · 24 Jun 2014 at 18:46

Had 100% usage on 32gb + another 30gb of page file in use yesterday, depends what your doing.

This was looking at datasets output from Neural Networks.