How Much RAM Best for Gaming

hansp · 6 Mar 2012 at 00:29

nalla said:
it realy dosent matter to the point that you have not read or taken in any of the comments that have been posted here, i have said that a 32 bit application cannot use more than approx 3 gig of ram, so bf3 cannot have 4gb of ram to itself because it cannot acces 4gb of ram due to it being a 32 bit application,

I think there is a thread about this somewhere. A 32bit application can address 2 GB or 4 GB, if marked LAA-compatible.

JimAroo · 6 Mar 2012 at 00:49

64 bit is pretty much a standard for gaming systems these days, due to this i'd recommend 8GB at the very minimum.

No excuse, RAM is so cheap these days.

Nightglow · 6 Mar 2012 at 07:58

JimAroo said:
64 bit is pretty much a standard for gaming systems these days, due to this I'd recommend 8GB at the very minimum.

No excuse, RAM is so cheap these days.

+1

Running 16gb on each of my four pc's, each one o/c to around 4.6ghz without any issues.

Zolohl · 6 Mar 2012 at 09:21

buy them cheap while it lasts..

Rex-Kramer · 6 Mar 2012 at 09:38

Delta12 said:
Makes me feel old i remember having the same debates about 8 meg and 16 meg of ram terrifying to think i'm using 4000 times more memory in my rig today than when i started pc gaming my first pc was 4 meg which i spent hundreds of pounds upgrading to 8meg.

You feel old? I spent £200 on a 512k upgrade for a Commodore Amiga to take it to 1mb just so i could play Dungeon Master!

bhavv · 6 Mar 2012 at 12:35

I've seen seveal games hit 4.5 Gb usage, on top of which Windows was also using the spare ram for caching.

After a day of having the PC on, windows usually manages to use every bit of free ram for caching too with next to no free tam left, this doesnt get reported on the green physical memory usage graph, but underneath it where it says cached, and free ram.

For smooth performance, you need enough ram for your games and open programs, and enough free ram on top for caching for which 4 Gb doesnt suffice anymore.

I see 4 Gb as a minimum now, and 8-12 Gb as the ideal amount for gaming.

I tried 24 Gb on my X58, but went back to 12 Gb of faster ram instead which does 1866 mhz @ 7-8-7-24-1T. I'd need to reach around 2200 Mhz on Cas 9 to match that, and no 4 gb modules will do that.

welshdragon said:
Just done this myself. Though haven't ramdisk'd any of it yet. Is setting up a ramdisk easy?

Very easy, though you have to pay for the software. I found one for a tenner and its very simple to use.