About this time each year we set out to see how much RAM is required to play the latest and greatest PC games. Last time we concluded that 8GB should be the minimum standard, while 16GB was desirable but not truly needed for general usage or gaming. Now a year later, we suspect this is still true, but we have seen a few games sneaking past 8GB of allocated memory so it's worth looking into again.
On the last go around we looked at a number of applications and found memory usage varies massively, so what you're doing with your PC will ultimately decide just how much memory you need. For basic office type work, 8GB should be more than enough. For content creation, the more the merrier -- 16 GB for example is the bare minimum when working with 4K footage in Premiere Pro.
I'm going to start a trend form Reddit. For my news posts, I'm going to put a TLR at the bottom for the lazy folks here lol
TLR
In a nutshell, if you plan to play the latest PC games on good quality settings, 4GB of RAM is out, 8GB is the bare minimum, 16GB is the sweet spot and 32GB is overkill.
i went from 2x4GB to 2x8GB, on my 2x4GB i'd often hit 6GB~7GB usage by multi-tasking, it certainly was "barely" sufficient.
with 2x8GB i've pretty much got an enormous headroom to play with, so far the highest i've managed to take up is 11GB, so still plenty of room.
Personally fully agree with the Techspot findings.
On top of that, keep in mind that the "free" memory is also effectively being used now by the OS (Windows10) by caching and precaching alot of common HD hits making all apps en operations even smoother so 11 used doesn't mean that the remaining 5 is just sitting there doing nothing.
16GB is indeed the sweet spot for that reason, and even more if you consider that the fastest kits with lowest latency typically come in that size and in the form of no more than 2 modules. Either 16 or 32
On my rig with 32gb system ram I often see 26gb cached at the end of the day. Thing is cached ram doesn't show up as being used since people didn't like seeing all their ram used up. Your system can and will use more ram if you have it available.
personally i didn't notice any difference in frames when after killing my 16GB kit and throwing back in my 8GB kit. The 8GB kit is also set much faster with very tight timings though.
even in games like pubg i dont think anyone could tell a difference without running a program to possible check .1% lows in background. but actual play and numbers i see on the fps counter are virtually the same.
On my rig with 32gb system ram I often see 26gb cached at the end of the day. Thing is cached ram doesn't show up as being used since people didn't like seeing all their ram used up. Your system can and will use more ram if you have it available.
When I moved to x299 I figured I might as well get enough ram that I won't have to worry about ram for the useful life of the system. Though I suspect that 32gb will still be overkill by the time I do move off x299. The rest of my rigs use 16gb.
at those capacities it might just make it practical to do a RAMDisk and cache an entire SSD's content, a backup software should be able to synchronize the two.
On my rig with 32gb system ram I often see 26gb cached at the end of the day. Thing is cached ram doesn't show up as being used since people didn't like seeing all their ram used up. Your system can and will use more ram if you have it available.
Definition of Cache :
Cached RAM is just RAM that the system think it "might" need again. in which case its in RAM already and does not need to be fetched. However should another application require more RAM than is Free, then cahced RAM will be cleared for the applications.
So even though your seeing it using 26GB, essentially you have 26GB thats free, unless you do the same things every day without reboots or shutdowns.
Ie you would be perfectly fine with 16GB RAM
I feel like RAM is the piece of tech that is the least advance out of everything in the computer.
Seriously, it's overpriced, The (More GBs) is holding everything back, they're freaking huge and need heat pipes and fans and most RAM isn't even top speed.
I feel like RAM should of been made to use less and require less,
Yet maintain higher speeds in a smaller package.
Look at the M.2 slots and how small HDs have gotten especially for the Speeds it can produce...
I feel like RAM is the piece of tech that is the least advance out of everything in the computer.
Seriously, it's overpriced, The (More GBs) is holding everything back, they're freaking huge and need heat pipes and fans and most RAM isn't even top speed.
I feel like RAM should of been made to use less and require less,
Yet maintain higher speeds in a smaller package.
Look at the M.2 slots and how small HDs have gotten especially for the Speeds it can produce...
We already have SODIMM and the regular height DIMM that do not extend past their retention clips. Yet for some reason people keep buying the big stuff despite they providing no advantages wahtsoever.
Ramdisks is about it. There's software you can get to see what files are loaded the most in a game and another software to install those files on the ramdisk and make the game load from that. I tested it once on GTA and shaved some time off loading but that didn't help it's awful loading at all.
My first pc had 512mb. Upgraded that to 2gb. Next PC had 8gb. Next PC coming up will have 16gb. I already got memory this holiday season because I don't see the prices coming down.
I've gotten by with 8GB since 2010. Although my Firefox memory usage has gone up considerably and I've basically changed nothing in how I use my PC in that time.
It used to use roughly 3.5-4GB. It's steadily creeping past 6GB now.
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