8GB or 16GB for gaming?

Mr G

Mr G

Mr G

Soldato
Joined
21 May 2018
Posts
2,742
Location
South Wales
Currently building a PC for my daughter for her college work and some gaming, Overwatch, Sims 4 and Destiny 2.

How much memory does her build really need? I'm getting mixed advice from 8GB 3000MHz to 16GB?
 

Firejack

Firejack

Firejack

Associate
Joined
15 Mar 2012
Posts
223
Location
UK
How much system memory you need will vary game to game. Its important to include how much video memory your graphics card has in the calculation. If you have 8GB of system memory but your graphics card only has 2GB of video memory. You will have problems. As textures and other graphics assets that can't be stored in video memory will need to be held in system memory.

When I played Destiny 2 before I upgraded earlier this year. I had 8GB of system memory and 4GB of video memory. Gaming at 1440p I had issues with frame rate drops caused by insufficient memory. Closing everything down in the background wasn't enough. If I had more video memory 6GB+ it might of been OK.

Really though you are best getting 16GB of system memory with a new build.
 

spectatorx

spectatorx

spectatorx

Associate
Joined
9 Nov 2018
Posts
22
8GB nowadays only if you need to cheap because of low budget, 16GB is what gamers should be aiming for. There is more and more games utilizing more than 8GB easily so ram would become bottleneck if you would go with "just" 8GB.

Also as Firejack already said, having gpu with "just" 4GB of vram becomes problematic more often which i can tell you that from my experience as i'm using r9 380 4GB and i'm waiting for navi to upgrade gpu to something with at least 8GB of vram. Performance of this gpu is not bad but in more and more games amount of vram is limiting this card and it is noticeable.
 

Phil2008

Phil2008

Phil2008

Soldato
Joined
17 Dec 2004
Posts
8,696
I have 16gb atm but I am getting another 16gb, I dont know if its a bit of a overkill but fingers and toes crossed I am going tobe keeping this system for quite a long time.. system in sig
 

Phil2008

Phil2008

Phil2008

Soldato
Joined
17 Dec 2004
Posts
8,696
I have just got another 16gb, 32gb in total... The pc isnt doing much atm but over 4gb is in use, (browsing net, watching tv with usb stick and a family member is streaming vids from pc) Also its catching 14gb of mem for my most used apps and stuff, so actually windows is eating up 16+gb.

2v00h2v.jpg
 

arknor

arknor

arknor

Caporegime
Joined
22 Nov 2005
Posts
45,255
Phil2008 said:
I have just got another 16gb, 32gb in total... The pc isnt doing much atm but over 4gb is in use, (browsing net, watching tv with usb stick and a family member is streaming vids from pc) Also its catching 14gb of mem for my most used apps and stuff, so actually windows is eating up 16+gb.
Click to expand...
I bet the majority in the cache never gets used more than once.
Yours says 28gb available, you have a web browser open, dunno what browser you use but firefox easily uses around 700-900mb somehow for me, your watching tv on a fire stick and someone is streaming a movie so your running some form of streaming service on the pc.

without that you would probably be using less than 2.5gb actual ram that windows cant use for something else.
On my pc im using 2.2gb doing nothing which leaves plenty for games, could close some background programmes if I wanted to and be using less

out of all the games I played only GTA V maxed out at 1080 had a problem with 8gb of ram (windows pop up saying I was running out of memory) game still seemed fine. I just needed to up my paging file a bit and it was fine without stutters playing.

You can game with 8gb but anyone buying a pc/building should get 16gb

i5 4670k @ 4ghz
980ti which I've had since release day when they were something stupid like £800 ?
8gb ram

Could easily have afforded to upgrade to 16gb at some point if I felt I really needed too.

It's not like I close a game and have any big black screen before the desktop loads, it's still instant.
maybe SSD helps with that though
 

Phil2008

Phil2008

Phil2008

Soldato
Joined
17 Dec 2004
Posts
8,696
arknor said:
I bet the majority in the cache never gets used more than once.
Yours says 28gb available, you have a web browser open, dunno what browser you use but firefox easily uses around 700-900mb somehow for me, your watching tv on a fire stick and someone is streaming a movie so your running some form of streaming service on the pc.

without that you would probably be using less than 2.5gb actual ram that windows cant use for something else.
On my pc im using 2.2gb doing nothing which leaves plenty for games, could close some background programmes if I wanted to and be using less

out of all the games I played only GTA V maxed out at 1080 had a problem with 8gb of ram (windows pop up saying I was running out of memory) game still seemed fine. I just needed to up my paging file a bit and it was fine without stutters playing.

You can game with 8gb but anyone buying a pc/building should get 16gb

i5 4670k @ 4ghz
980ti which I've had since release day when they were something stupid like £800 ?
8gb ram

Could easily have afforded to upgrade to 16gb at some point if I felt I really needed too.

It's not like I close a game and have any big black screen before the desktop loads, it's still instant.
maybe SSD helps with that though
Click to expand...

I have just bought myself a old hauppage tv stick with AV component connections so I can connect it to the sky box to it, to watch my recordings when Im on my pc, not near my main tv.... But yeah I prob wont come close to using 32gb in the yrs to come, but I do 3d printing and the prints can use up a good few gb while printing and I use waterfox as my internet browser.

But seeing that the memory has come down so much in these last few weeks, I couldnt resist and its something special to go with a 8086k.. Its mainly all epeen atm. but you never know I could make use of some of the extra memory in the yrs to come as Im hopeing not to change my pc for quite a while.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom