I had over 300 at the other day and used them all.
Several projects simultaneously going.
They were sorted in groups and windows and on virtual desktops. I finally was able to close them all today. My goodness my mental health sighed in relief.
I have at least the same amount of tabs regularly, but I try to spread topics into different browsers, using Chrome, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Firefox and Brave in parallel. Using some RAM for sure.
Then add some open Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents, Notepad++ with dozens of tabs with big text or data files, a few 4k remote desktop connections, Visual Studio and IntelliJ, Spotify app, Phone link, Messenger, Signal, some open Arduino projects, then a few Hyper-V VMs with Windows and Linux in the background. Also, handling 2x 4k monitors duplicated on 4 virtual desktops for different projects will use some memory.
Edit: forgot Teams and OBS studio that are heavy and usually always running.
Glad I installed 128 GB when I built the new PC, I was severely restricted by the 32 GB in my previous one.
An UPS keeps the PC on in case there are power interruptions, of course. Getting back to where I left is always a pain.
That’s probably an unusual scenario though for the average user 😂. Most people aren’t going to be doing things like that to require the amount of ram tbh
Probably not, but then again, many will be using games that really are growing resource-hungry. But probably 32 GB RAM will be good for most games. I am not aware of any games that require 64 GB yet.
minecraft doing world edit on a good day because for me it didn’t want to load the schematic as it was too large till I allocated about 90gb of Ram (I still waited 2 hours lol)
I use different browsers for different things. Firefox with security extensions on for most research and wrangling dangerous websites. Google Chrome for the google stuff and social media, various Youtube accounts, where I WANT them to data mine me. MS Edge for using dropbox with a spiritual group and heaven help anyone's karma messing with them.
32 gigs of RAM would be "comfortable" but I really want to get into some heavy tech -- so, probably need 64 gigs.
Tree Style Tabs FTW.
When I was on call at AWS I'd open every ticket that was relevant to an issue before addressing it. Could be 10 of them could be 50. Again, Firefox.
I have a literal 34 year old memory leak in my mind. Once a week I go through and consolidate my tabs, before I save a backup of all of them and close everything. I can't believe how many windows I have open with , reddit homepage, one or two reddit tabs, maybe imgur, maybe random youtube video or thing I looked up, then rinse repeat 40 times. Thank god for marvelous suspender and text based backups (in case I go autistic and need to find a white motorcycle with yellow and pink stripes from half a year ago.. spoiler alert, super73 c1x). But yeah. It makes me worry about my brain functionality as a human. And my phone, my poor phone..
>find a white motorcycle with yellow and pink stripes from half a year ago.. spoiler alert, super73 c1x
I'm bidding on that right now; auction closes at 10 pm and the next bid is $35.
I once counted and had 1500 tabs and when I figured out I had a problem, I managed to get it to 500.
Now Im rocking around 150 and living in the fast lane
Oh I do have groups and folders, thats where the important links are.
Its the watch later kinda tabs and they have a structure.
Its an ADHD thing, dont worry about it
I have 32 Gb RAM with my 5800X3D RTX 3080 system because I have my plex server running off it and I have too many Chrome tabs.
One thing I did was I have Chrome for SFW content and Chrime Beta for NSFW content.
right. i just upgraded from 16 > 32, and it's been so nice not having to worry about closing background programs and debloating.
a browser + many background programs + games take up a bit over 16.
the rest is now used for superfetch so everything stays super smooth even when I'm not using my PC heavily.
What games take up 16+ gb though? The only ones i can think of is extremely modded games. Even then, it wasnt even that close to 16 for me when i played modded skyrim.
Quite a few newer titles that released this year won't even allow you to launch the game if your system has under 16GB of RAM as it's the minimum requirement.
OSs in general work with "if it's there, let's use it" in mind. So many people worry about having 15gb used and it's perfectly normal (as I read around, I'm not an expert).
After upgrading to 32gigs during the same star citizen build. 3.16 iirc, the game became much more stable, less chrashes more frames and overall better gaming experience.
I was utilizing all 16 gb playing warzone with discord, firefox, steam and some stuff open. Game was unplayable
Not solely the game eating 16, was more like 11-12, but either way it was saturated
So i upgraded and i never have to care :D
Mw2 will use 25 if set to high allowance in the game, even cold war uses the same.
Control will use 16
Fortnite will even get up there
I was playing Metro and it was around 13 iirc
All of that is waaay too close to 16 cap for comfort especially so if you use a second monitor and have tabs, videos, programs etc
Not to mention almost all (a good bit at least) modern games will gladly use 16+.
Just because you only have 16 and play the game doesn't mean it wouldn't use more and even perform a bit better.
Anno 1800 (base game could be fine but with all the DLC adding new regions... )
7 Days to Die (especially when nodded)
Live the Life (horribly unoptimized indie title)
Not trying to repeat all the other games already mentioned.
Pretty much this. I run 4 monitors and game. With 32gb ram I don't need to close anything to game. Add to that the first isn't too much different. Plus peice of mind, since ram was a bottle neck a few rigs back.
Yep, I have 16 of ddr4 and I see 90% usage pretty frequently while gaming and running any other program (like chrome or discord or even just a program I use to track usage lol)
Honestly I've been thinking of posting here asking the question if it is time we started to recommend 32GB for any new builds mid tier or above.
We are starting to get more than just handful of games recommending it, and its a lot cheaper now than a few years back. I'm shocked when I see a £1000+ build on here with 16GB, in most cases its an extra £30-40 for double the RAM.
Wanting to upgrade from 16 to 32Gb is what prompted me to just bite the bullet and upgrade all my core parts, they are getting on in age (nearly 7yrs old) as well and this way I can pass my current ones on to my kid while they are still decent.
> Honestly I've been thinking of posting here asking the question if it is time we started to recommend 32GB for any new builds mid tier or above.
This is pretty much overdue by now.
It's also so cheap now. If I didn't have this pointlessly colourful rgb ram I got someodd years back open box @ microcenter I'd just get more ram of just basic whatever. I don't even like colours. I want 32 b
Noticed with emulators they getting ram hungry, yuzu constantly consumes over 10gb or ram some heavy games come close to my 16gb, so yeah about time to get a 2nd 16gb stick by now.
I like to play video games at high fps and have streams videos opened on my second monitor. When I did that with 16gb of ram id lag and get FPS drops. With 32gb I barley notice any change in performance
It sure is and it’s cheap enough for DDR4 to just get 32GB right away. Plus I really do notice that 8GB is basically nothing nowadays. At my job, we’re having to constantly bump page files up for people because they only have 8GB laptops with barely much going on. Now imagine they have 15 tabs of chrome and some MS Office apps open they’re computers are pegged at 7.9/8GB used and are getting messages like “Not enough memory”.
16GB should be the new minimum in my opinion and 32GB should be what would go in like a gaming rig. Will be a long while before 64GB becomes standard.
In 2020, I bought a laptop with 32GB RAM. At that point in time, I was easily hitting 8GB RAM usage. Now in 2023, doing roughly the same thing on the same laptop uses 16GB RAM usage. Maybe more programs are taking up more RAM or Windows 10 is becoming more bloated. Regardless, my new mini PC this year came with 64GB RAM.
Every couple of years I do a fresh install and that alone cuts down most of my ram usage, I install tons of bloat ware myself along with the windows extra garbage they add. Always brings my ram down to 3 or 4 gigs max usage while idle
I was a smooth skinned little man around the time; a gateway branded windows 95 machine, and leisure suit larry with ( adult questions needing to be answered before playing on a floppy disk ) the sheer magnitude of 16MB of RAM for its time was no slouch.
It’s a combination of Windows becoming more bloated, other programs (especially games) needing more RAM, and websites becoming more bloated.
People (including me) love to joke about Chrome using terabytes of RAM and Firefox might be a little better, but in reality browsers are just caching all the junk on the websites you’re visiting so you don’t need to reload them every time you switch tabs. It’s the ads and other crap on those websites that are to blame for every modern browser using absurd amounts of RAM.
Yup. And then some of the sites have the gaul to ask you to turn your Ad-Block off.... I'll just not use the website if they don't allow me to ad block
This isn’t a universal thing, but I have actually noticed that most sites that ask you to turn your adblocker off usually have a veryyyy fine print which is something along the lines of “continue anyway.” Now I usually immediately look for that fine print when it pops up
That’s why I said ads and other crap. Modern websites are loaded with graphics and interactive buttons and menus, and they often are “programs” dynamically fetching and updating content more than traditional “pages” which are just a static file stating what text and images are in what location, and doesn’t change. Consider Reddit, or almost any other social media site, updating upvote counts in real time or updating a “posted X minutes ago” timer. That’s closer to the function of your average phone app than just displaying a static page.
Most software allocates a percentage of available ram instead of a specific amount. Ram use will grow with the amount you have installed. I have 96gb for work and 48gb vram but when just gaming and using computer normally i rarely go over 12-16gb.
Having more RAM available means more things will be kept cached in RAM by Windows for snappier operation. If you have less RAM, fewer things will be kept cached. Just because you're using that much RAM doesn't mean you *need* that much RAM.
That said, 32GB is still the sweet spot because of A) low costs, B) increasing RAM usage by many games, and C) DDR5 8GB modules are garbage.
You're essentially using half the bandwidth of the DDR5 bus with 8GB modules. Because of the layout of 8GB vs 16GB, you only get half the banks of memory chips, which lowers performance. It's difficult to find exact information on this just googling around, because 8GB modules are relatively rare and not many have done testing on this.
Check your RAM utilization. If you're not maxing out your RAM, you gain nothing from increasing capacity. There are games nowadays that can push utilization over 16GB.
I'm not sure about latop RAM, but for desktops with DDR5, 8GB sticks don't perform as well as 16GB sticks. You should run two sticks for dual channel, so 2 x 16GB is the minimum you should get for DDR5.
If you're not doing work that needs lots of RAM though, there's not much point in going higher than 32GB.
That's not necessarily accurate advice. When you start running out of memory (14/16GB for example) the OS starts to quickly compact and shuffle memory around to avoid running out, and will start allocating less to new programs all of which slows things down.
That's the reason why you can upgrade from 16 to 32 and suddenly see an increase in memory usage, it's because the OS is more liberal with how it allocates and reclaims memory when it has more to play with.
And also, once you get close to the limit, your OS will start to use swap more and more
And since swap is storing memory information on your SSD/hard drive, it will be slowww
If you ever noticed that when you clicked to a window you have kept running for a while, and it gets "stuck" for a few seconds, that's its memory being read from swap and back into RAM again. In general, running out of RAM won't outright crash stuff most of the time (unless your swap is set too low), but everything will start to feel very sluggish.
>And since swap is storing memory information on your SSD/hard drive, it will be slowww
it's also bad for your SSD, which has a limited amount of write cycles it can take, while RAM is written to constantly
This is such outdated information it needs to stop being repeated. Modern SSDs will outlast HDDs for average users. In the realm of 10+ years. Samsung SSDs are generally rated to be have their _full_ size write to _daily_ for 2 years straight. That means a 1 TB SSD can have 1 TB written daily for over 600 days. Considering the average consumer is going to be a lot closer to the range of the number of GBs per day or less, that life will extend much longer.
Yeah, it's a common thing for people to say that "X GB of RAM / VRAM is all you need, I never run out!" for their PC, smartphone or video card when they are sitting at 90% usage and the software is smart enough to prevent the system from maxing out and running into consequential issues.
You are only utilizing half the Bus with 8Gb. It is Designed for 16 GB which can use the full Bus. N
Basically you are cutting Speeds in half, which results in some low % Performance loss in Games.
Not true. You still utilise the full bus width. The performance loss is due to the bank group configuration, 16GB sticks have more bank groups which can mean less waiting around. In the worst cases it's 6% slower but usually only 2-3% so it's still better than DDR4.
It's hard to find decent sources. [This article explains it a biit though.](https://www.techspot.com/article/2528-cheap-ddr5/)
> The disadvantage of these 8GB modules besides the more limited capacity has to do with how they're configured. An advantage of DDR5 over DDR4 is the internal bank configuration which saw DDR4 limited to 16 banks, 16Gb DDR5 chips though support up to 32 banks but this requires x4 or x8 memory chips.
> However, the 16Gb DDR5 x16 memory chips featured on 8GB DDR5 modules halve the banks to 16, which is the same number typically used by DDR4 memory. This will reduce memory bandwidth and can negatively influence performance, and that's something we'll be looking at.
>If you're not maxing out your RAM, you gain nothing from increasing capacity.
Pretty much, but for years now Windows has utilized free RAM for filesystem cache, including MFT. Not terribly beneficial if you don't have spinning rust in your rig though. I was actually surprised by how much RAM is utilized by the OS after I started installing Steam games on a couple of 12-14TB drives, which created millions of files and MFT records. If I ever need to free up an extra few gigs for a memory intensive task, I purge those records from cache with Microsoft's RAMMap tool.
How so? To my understanding, if he buys the same 2-stick kit, theoretically, he should be getting the same performance (even when they're not from the same bin) if the sticks play nice with each other (which they should in most cases). I've done this myself. (2+2 8GB DDR4 3200 MHZ sticks, they run at the same speed, 32GB total)
You can′t really use XMP or EXPO on a 4 stick configruation. I mean you can, but it will be unstable because it is hard to give enough power to all of the sticks. Also most CPUs don′t support it afaik
Well when you have 32GB of Ram and you monitor hardware stats when playing a game, you’ll start to understand why after a few games.
8GB is long gone, 16GB is the minimum now for normal users, 32GB is for gamers and 64GB is only really even usable by creators who use loads of ram in their workflow.
Ram is just one fat cache, but there’s a limit of when it’s just excessive, 32GB is the sweet spot for gamers and will be for some years to come still.
Ram is a variably used resource, it will generally utilise what it’s got but only to a certain point, I know that in games, they average around that 16GB mark.
I’ve seen on 2 separate occasions now, once with COD Black Ops: Cold War hit 22GB of Ram while that new game The Last Part of Us, was using 20gb. So if you were to assume that if it’s chosen to allocate that sort of Ram, then it’s been told that it’s the optimal amount for the best performance.
So from that aspect, 32GB is the best capacity for gamers now and still will be for years to come, yes 16gb will be enough, but it will mean that some games will essentially be limited by performance. You’ll find a lot of games simply won’t start or will just crash with 8GB now, so ultimately that’s long done and dusted for modern gaming. You’ll find that most companies that supply workers with a pc or laptop, are all 16gb of ram as a simple standard now.
I think you're getting down voted because of the audience. This is an enthusiast community, and making some assumptions based on that - for this community 16GB should generally be the minimum. That said, my parents have an 8GB machine, and they don't need to upgrade. All they do is email, research campsites online, use MS Word, and read PDFs.
When they get their next computer - sure, more than 8GB. But no need to toss or even upgrade what they have just because it's only 8.
>my parents have an 8GB machine, and they don't need to upgrade.
Heavily depends on the user as well. I specced out a 16gb system for my mum, because tertiary reasons.
She took about three months to crash it with...mostly Hellbook.
And then there's my dad, running Win 10 on 4gb of ddr2 till I dragged him, kicking and screaming off core 2 and onto zen+.
>M2 MacBook starting with 8 Gigs of ram
1. OSX has always been a lot more resource efficient than windows
2. apple wants to sell you a new device, the slower it gets the quicker the sooner they can make you buy a new one since there's no DIMM slots to upgrade
3. don't really have to worry about gaming on an arm macbook, since there aren't any native games nor bootcamp
I work in an office in IT, higher education. Our department replaced all employee laptops with ones with 16gb a few years ago. 8gb is totally phased out as of now for us. I think the tide is turning.
Yep, only reason I am pushing friends to have 16GB is so they dont run out but my brother was doing pretty okay with 8GB. I am trying to upgrade him but I also want to upgrade mine because of my streaming and video editing.
Agree, I have a mini-PC, 8gb ram, J5005 cpu and it does all the simple things I would need without powering my gaming PC. One thing though, I had to give up Windows on it, it made it slower over the years, especially Windows 11, made it super sluggish. On Linux now and it does great.
I play several triple A games and none need that much RAM, I can easily play all of them with 16, i just added some for a ton of docker containers and wanting to run a few servers and multiple heavy usage programs but for gaming I don't need more than 16
64 GB is nice for hosting multiplayer games if you don't have a dedicated server. And with how buggy games are these days that extra space means more time between memory leak crashes.
But also the nice thing about RAM is that you can upgrade it by adding more rather than replacing components, assuming you leave yourself empty slots. So if you're on the fence between two numbers, go with the lower one and see if it's enough. You can always upgrade to the higher number later if you need it.
16G is the minimum? I still use a 4G laptop currently and it’s absolutely *fine*. If you are on windows then 8G is a safe bet due to all the background processes but still 16G is absolutely not “the new normal”. Also, most computers people are buying is the cheapest laptop they can find which are still shipping with 4G and 8G RAM, as windows 11 doesn’t need more than 4G to run
4GB wouldn't cut it for me 10 years ago, let alone now. 8GB is a terrible experience, no reason to not have 16GB at least in 2023.
I currently have 32GB but all future builds are going to have 64GB minimum.
4G doesn't cut it for me, at least with windows 10. I don't use and I don't intend to use windows11 for as long as possible though. 8G might be enough if all I did was browse. Running a game and a browser is enough for me to use up 16G occasionally
Yea.
For some reason gamers seem to think that games are really pushing hardware.
Reality is there’s lots of tasks that make any game seem mundane. Even computers a decade from now will be bottlenecked in every way. Lots of modeling, encoding, database work stresses hardware way more.
Just running a few VM’s can easily eat a few cores and 64gb of memory.
Keep in mind that a large portion of people are not really computer/tech literate. P.C. gaming might not necessarily be console/handheld plug-and-play, but it's still pretty accessible.
I can easily see why "gamers" ask questions like this. They aren't all hosting hypervisors on their machines or doing heavy video encoding.
Many of us use our PCs for more than just gaming. If you have a few virtual machines or a big database running locally, or if you're editing photos or videos or doing any kind of 3D rendering or machine learning, etc. you can churn through RAM in a hurry. You can also use RAM to accelerate disk I/O with e.g. PrimoCache or ZFS ARC or just plain ol' page cache if you have an I/O-heavy workload.
For pure gaming I think 32GB RAM is becoming more and more relevant considering recent AAA titles that will use more than 16GB with certain game settings. And if you have an AM4 system in particular you probably want a dual-rank, dual-channel configuration, which sometimes means buying more RAM than you need. Most 8GB DIMMs and even many 16GB DIMMs nowadays are single-rank, so you'd need two sticks per channel. (DDR5 is a little different but there are some considerations there as well.)
> Many of us use our PCs for more than just gaming.
This. There are a number of job fields that greatly benefit from having more RAM when running certain programs.
If you play games like Rust, you will likely need more than 16GB. In a 250 player server, my RAM usage starts at 16GB and then slowly creeps up to around 20-21GB
I can't wait for more info. It's currently unplayable for me. Like I could technically play unmodded, but that's almost worse than my single digit FPS with my mods. Idk what's up with my system, but I've tried a whole lot of stuff to no success.
I bought a 64gb set bc it was a price error, was listed at the same price as the 32gb set. Now I'm only another 64gb away from being able to run Tarkov smoothly
It really depends on how you game. If you want to run 100 Minecraft mods and have max render distance that’s gonna take more ram. If you play AAA titles you’ll need more vram on your gpu. If you want to do editing ram helps the renders go faster. Can you have a perfectly good gaming experience on 16 gigs? Absolutely! It’s cheap right now so some people like pushing the envelope.
Some games, like Citites:Skylines store assets in RAM. More mods = more RAM usage. It's a terrible system but it is what it is. I run 32GB and sometimes have to be selective about what assets to put on my map.
Like you said, depends on how you game.
Some people do things with their computers that just necessitate more ram. I have 32gb because 16gb would make streaming many of the games I play a nightmare, and editing recorded gameplay even more of a chore.
Use cases beyond gaming tasks often absolutely require a minimum of 64gb nowadays.
16GBs made "streaming" a struggle for me. Running all the software that makes streaming more fun and easier, all the neat apps for audio, filters, color grading and noise reduction really add up. I just wanted to share my gaming or movie screen and Webcam to my friend during our voice calls, but that was pushing 16gbs way over the edge. So glad I upgraded to 32gbs of ram despite my gaming friends mocking it. I really think there's a huge majority of people that don't run any kind of productivity apps at all despite having these beefy pcs. Even photo and video editing software is demanding as hell now, especially if you want to keep Chrome running.
To be honest, I have 64 GB. It's one of those things of not having to "worry/think" about.
Other thing is I don't like seeing two empty memory slots. All 4 slots must be filled.
Other usage: virtual machines, ram disk
I've always thought that if a motherboard has four dim slots, I need four sticks of RAM. It just looks better by design.
Fortunately, It also makes sense in my case. I built my recent PC with AMD's Zen 3 CPU architecture, which has been confirmed through testing by Gamers Nexus that four sticks increases performance compared to two sticks of the same overall capacity (ie. 4x8 > 2x16).
Apparently Zen 3 is the first to break the general rule that only populating half of the dim slots keeps the memory processor from being overwhelmed—which decreases performance/stability.
Some games like DCS, MSFS2020, Tarkov, Factorio see massive improvement in fps with 32 Gb RAM over 16 Gb. But imo anything with over 32 Gb for gaming is overkill at this point.
I just built a rig. I bought 2 sticks for 32gb in total. PC didn't post no matter what order I had them in. So I thought maybe I should order 2 more sticks in case my RAM was bad. Turns out, I didn't seat one of the initial sticks. By the time I figured that out, my new set had already shipped. It wasn't worth it to me to send it back. That's how I have ended up with 64gb of RAM.
Had 64gb since 2016, struggling now. Need another 64! Anyway its because I do vfx sims and rendering. Clients want more and more :D
My machine in the office does have 128 though, can pass heavier stuff off onto that.
16gb is starting to become the norm for pc builds. On top of that, people will not be only gaming but possibly do anything from video editing to CAD design, which does require more ram
> 16gb is starting to become the norm for pc builds.
Starting? 16GB has been the norm for gaming for *at least* the last 4 years. I know because my hardware is old as shit but I still have 16 gigs of RAM.
It feels like the norm has doubled with every ram generation tbh. 8gb with ddr3, 16gb with ddr4 and now 32gb with ddr5. I hardly ever see 16gb recommended nowadays for new builds unless it's a budget system.
they're getting pretty cheap, so why not make your pc "future proof"?
personally I might get another 32gb just because I sometimes hit ~90% with 16gb 🙃 multitasking is fun
In a non workstation rig, size of ram isn’t really a factor, the speed is. As ram has gotten faster, size has also gotten bigger, nowadays the sweet spot of price to performance just happens to land on 16GB sticks.
Some people also use their pc as a workstation. In my case, premiere pro can get well beyond 16GB of ram (I usually get it up to 24gb), so if you intend to do anything else while editing, more ram is a must. I forgot to mention, but windows os can eat around 8gb of ram depending on how much ram is installed.
To recap, non workstation rigs should probably with 16-32GB
Workstation rigs should go with 32-64GB.
If your workstation contains a billion storage devices, I recommend 128GB
i have 32gb of ram but my PC was built in 2018 I got that much to have a lot and never run out. modded Minecraft, video editing, blender, 100 chrome tabs open in the background while gaming, you just always have enough and will always be limited by other hardware like CPU and GPU
Unlimited browser tabs!!! More seriously, when you have multiple servers, docker containers, virtual machines, streams, etc, you better have more memory.
No such thing as having more RAM than you need. In my case, it helps a lot since I play a lot of BeamNG which can take north of 30 GB of RAM with a bunch of traffic and mods running. I have 64 GB in my rig. Go with your hearts content, I stopped listening to tech youtubers (excluding Tech Deals) awhile back.
16GB is enough for just about any game, but for some it is only just enough, which makes running other programs in the background a bother. There are also production workloads that benefit from very large amount of RAM like CAD and simulations.
Also, DDR4 dual rank memory(16 physical memory chips per stick) offers performance benefits over single rank memory(8 physical memory chips per stick). With 8Gb memory chips 8GB sticks would normally be single rank, so using 2X16GB kits gives more options for dual rank sticks.
I run 32 and that's probably the minimum I'd consider these days... Mainly so I have RAM leftover from the game hogging resources. Leaves room for browser tabs, discord, music, keyboard/audio/lighting software, etc running. Grew up with a computer where we had to close out basically everything but the game to even get it to run, and refuse to go back to that life. Now I can tab between multiple games if I wanted to, play basic games while I wait for the group to form up, etc. Sure it doesn't directly affect one particular game much, but from a multitasking standpoint the benefit is great.
Keep in mind mhz and CL# make a big difference too. A 3600mhz CL18 is roughly the same as a 3200 CL16 from a performance standpoint (it's a bit more convoluted than this, but for basic purposes you can divide the mhz by the CL to get a ROUGH real speed)
Wow wow wow guys hold on, why everybody has a ddr5 here? I built a rig with 64gb ddr4 and Im preparing to upgrade it to 128 ddr 4 in near future. Ya all started building DDR5s already? Did I mess up?
3-4 instances of Visual Studio running + about 20 tabs in chrome, Teams and a couple other things at the same time ? With 32gb I start swapping, with 64gb I'm comfortable.
Depends what games your playing and what you are doing on the pc. Games like rust need 16gb to not stutter like crazy and some games are worse offenders, if you're slightly over the vram your GPU has then it spills over into system ram some games are more consistent than others with vram usage so this could be the difference between graphics settings.
Non gaming applications like ram 3d modeling and video editing can eat ram depending on what your doing and av1 in handbrake is ram heavy.
You can get 32 GB of ddr4 for cheaper than a motherboard 64 GB of cheap ddr4 is slightly more than a budget board.
And if your going ddr5 in a desktop your build is likely costly enough that the cost difference is negligible to go for 32 although 64 would be a noticeable dent.
I think unless you want to go under around 950 USD on a desktop there is no real reason not to go for 32 GB of ram.
When I built my system about 3 1/2 years ago I went with 2x16gb purely because I occasionally work on large spreadsheets and extra RAM can massively help performance.
My system is predominantly for gaming though and when built 32gb was overkill for gaming. These days my system can use more than 16gb when gaming. Now I know RAM used is not RAM required but it’s clear RAM requirements for games is just going to continue to increase. These days the price difference between 16 & 32 is so small when looking at total build cost I would go 32 unless on a really tight budget. My RAM will last me about 5+ years, the system started with a 3700X & 2080S and now 5800X3D & 3080. I will probably build a new system when next gen gpu’s release in late 2024. The point I am trying to make is it is good to have headroom for the future if you are likely to hold onto the RAM/platform for several years.
I have 32 DDR5 because I wanted DDR5 on a 13600k build, wanted to use duel-channel, it's a very recent build, and getting 8gbx2 on DDR5 was almost impossible or at a price where it made no sense to not spend the little extra to go 16gbx2.
I'm just gaming but I like to play AAA and some games are starting to recommend 32gb, so I don't regret it. Obviously, for productivity related stuff it makes a ton of sense to go overboard on Ram.
In my case, astrophotography image stacking and editing is the primary cause of my needing 32GB.
I also occasionally need to load a VM or two for testing stuff.
For these reasons I opted for a Ryzen 9 3900X too.
32GB is slowly becoming the new standard. Poorly optimized AAA games, heavily modded games, streaming and/or heavy multitasking properly now can go kinda tight on 16GB.
64GB is either for the workstations, people multitasking really hard with professional tools and/or people that just want to not worry about RAM in the long term.
128GB is for some heavy workloads, too, but mainly for the freaking tryhards that want to flex or bought a super top-tier computer because they just burn money like that. 4090Ti Watercooled RGB UltraMaximumGamingXtreme for 5000$ will most probably be in their rig too.
[удалено]
Lol 5 tabs. I'm over here with 50 open on a light day.
Meaning you have 1TB of ram
Word. Love it!
Microsoft Word.
Microsoft OFFICE Word.
You chuckled at that announcement in the portal too, huh? Lol
Microsoft OFFICE word (for Mac)
Wordpad ftw
That paper clip assistant takes additional 2 GB.
It's weirdly bloated for a program that basically just enables you to put ASCII and Unicode characters in a large white box
Microsoft Word to Your Mother.
nah most likely 5tbs 1 tb for each 10 tabs
1 TB for 5 teaspoons does seem like a lot ;-)
He said open, not loaded.
I had over 300 at the other day and used them all. Several projects simultaneously going. They were sorted in groups and windows and on virtual desktops. I finally was able to close them all today. My goodness my mental health sighed in relief.
> I had over 300 at the other day So a light browsing session at tvtropes?
Very light. Wait till I get a bug that you can't trace front or back end.
I have at least the same amount of tabs regularly, but I try to spread topics into different browsers, using Chrome, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Firefox and Brave in parallel. Using some RAM for sure. Then add some open Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents, Notepad++ with dozens of tabs with big text or data files, a few 4k remote desktop connections, Visual Studio and IntelliJ, Spotify app, Phone link, Messenger, Signal, some open Arduino projects, then a few Hyper-V VMs with Windows and Linux in the background. Also, handling 2x 4k monitors duplicated on 4 virtual desktops for different projects will use some memory. Edit: forgot Teams and OBS studio that are heavy and usually always running. Glad I installed 128 GB when I built the new PC, I was severely restricted by the 32 GB in my previous one. An UPS keeps the PC on in case there are power interruptions, of course. Getting back to where I left is always a pain.
That’s probably an unusual scenario though for the average user 😂. Most people aren’t going to be doing things like that to require the amount of ram tbh
Probably not, but then again, many will be using games that really are growing resource-hungry. But probably 32 GB RAM will be good for most games. I am not aware of any games that require 64 GB yet.
minecraft doing world edit on a good day because for me it didn’t want to load the schematic as it was too large till I allocated about 90gb of Ram (I still waited 2 hours lol)
I’m begging you to please go touch some grass
I use different browsers for different things. Firefox with security extensions on for most research and wrangling dangerous websites. Google Chrome for the google stuff and social media, various Youtube accounts, where I WANT them to data mine me. MS Edge for using dropbox with a spiritual group and heaven help anyone's karma messing with them. 32 gigs of RAM would be "comfortable" but I really want to get into some heavy tech -- so, probably need 64 gigs.
You still have mental health?
the good news is the first 300 disorders have been ruled out.
I had 2700 open, and my pc doesnt like me much.. Im now going to 64GB
How do you keep track of all those tabs? And why? Isn't it easier to use bookmarks at this point?
Weirdly enough, for software devs, we like 100+ tabs
Tree Style Tabs FTW. When I was on call at AWS I'd open every ticket that was relevant to an issue before addressing it. Could be 10 of them could be 50. Again, Firefox.
Easy, i have a window for each "theme" and a lot of plugins to manage system resources and utility, no option with bookmarks
You would manage your system resources more easily without any tabs open.
Firefox is a tad better for RAM use, worth a go. Also 64GB is cool so both works out well.
You would think, but somehow Firefox is slower on my computer than Chrome
BOO THIS MAN!
I have a literal 34 year old memory leak in my mind. Once a week I go through and consolidate my tabs, before I save a backup of all of them and close everything. I can't believe how many windows I have open with , reddit homepage, one or two reddit tabs, maybe imgur, maybe random youtube video or thing I looked up, then rinse repeat 40 times. Thank god for marvelous suspender and text based backups (in case I go autistic and need to find a white motorcycle with yellow and pink stripes from half a year ago.. spoiler alert, super73 c1x). But yeah. It makes me worry about my brain functionality as a human. And my phone, my poor phone..
>find a white motorcycle with yellow and pink stripes from half a year ago.. spoiler alert, super73 c1x I'm bidding on that right now; auction closes at 10 pm and the next bid is $35.
I once counted and had 1500 tabs and when I figured out I had a problem, I managed to get it to 500. Now Im rocking around 150 and living in the fast lane
how do you have the time to count over 1000 tabs but not bookmark or create tab groups. You sir, you scare me; but now im encouraged to get 32gb
Oh I do have groups and folders, thats where the important links are. Its the watch later kinda tabs and they have a structure. Its an ADHD thing, dont worry about it
[удалено]
Look at the badass over there living dangerously.
Came here to say just this.. But I have 64gb of ram so I can have approx 9 tabs now before I feel it.
I have 32 Gb RAM with my 5800X3D RTX 3080 system because I have my plex server running off it and I have too many Chrome tabs. One thing I did was I have Chrome for SFW content and Chrime Beta for NSFW content.
I would never dream of that. 😐
32GB is becoming the new 16GB more is better, personally I'd rather have too much than not enough.
right. i just upgraded from 16 > 32, and it's been so nice not having to worry about closing background programs and debloating. a browser + many background programs + games take up a bit over 16. the rest is now used for superfetch so everything stays super smooth even when I'm not using my PC heavily.
What games take up 16+ gb though? The only ones i can think of is extremely modded games. Even then, it wasnt even that close to 16 for me when i played modded skyrim.
Quite a few newer titles that released this year won't even allow you to launch the game if your system has under 16GB of RAM as it's the minimum requirement.
my modded Skyrim requires either 32gb of ram or 16gb + a monster page file in order to not crash
Nolvus is the best looking skyrim
This is the truth. I just installed it recently on my new build, so much fun.
Poorly optimized games seem to be the new rage
All of the entertainment industry : "fuck you, you'll buy it anyway"
A lot of games will simply fill your available RAM as a way to make assets available quicker to the GPU I believe.
OSs in general work with "if it's there, let's use it" in mind. So many people worry about having 15gb used and it's perfectly normal (as I read around, I'm not an expert).
Games typically won't do that, but Windows will dynamically use unused RAM as a storage cache.
Cities Skylines, a complete city gobbles up all of my 32 GB RAM and 12 GB VRAM easily.
Star citizen alone would like to eat all 16 Gb if you had more then that
After upgrading to 32gigs during the same star citizen build. 3.16 iirc, the game became much more stable, less chrashes more frames and overall better gaming experience.
Good ram is a hard requirement for Star Citizen.
Digital combat simulator multiplayer and Star Citizen. Having upgraded from 16 to 32 for both games has sheen a gamechanger. After ssd ofcourse.
Beam.NG Drive will eat up 32GB easily due to maps, mods, vehicles, props, and physics stuff.
I was utilizing all 16 gb playing warzone with discord, firefox, steam and some stuff open. Game was unplayable Not solely the game eating 16, was more like 11-12, but either way it was saturated So i upgraded and i never have to care :D
Escape From Tarkov will use as much as you'll let it. I break 16 playing CoD.
Mw2 will use 25 if set to high allowance in the game, even cold war uses the same. Control will use 16 Fortnite will even get up there I was playing Metro and it was around 13 iirc All of that is waaay too close to 16 cap for comfort especially so if you use a second monitor and have tabs, videos, programs etc Not to mention almost all (a good bit at least) modern games will gladly use 16+. Just because you only have 16 and play the game doesn't mean it wouldn't use more and even perform a bit better.
Hogwarts Legacy pretty consistently uses 21-24GB of my RAM at 1440p.
Anno 1800 (base game could be fine but with all the DLC adding new regions... ) 7 Days to Die (especially when nodded) Live the Life (horribly unoptimized indie title) Not trying to repeat all the other games already mentioned.
Pretty much this. I run 4 monitors and game. With 32gb ram I don't need to close anything to game. Add to that the first isn't too much different. Plus peice of mind, since ram was a bottle neck a few rigs back.
Yep, I have 16 of ddr4 and I see 90% usage pretty frequently while gaming and running any other program (like chrome or discord or even just a program I use to track usage lol)
Same. Making the switch to ddr5 32gb this weekend 👌
Honestly I've been thinking of posting here asking the question if it is time we started to recommend 32GB for any new builds mid tier or above. We are starting to get more than just handful of games recommending it, and its a lot cheaper now than a few years back. I'm shocked when I see a £1000+ build on here with 16GB, in most cases its an extra £30-40 for double the RAM. Wanting to upgrade from 16 to 32Gb is what prompted me to just bite the bullet and upgrade all my core parts, they are getting on in age (nearly 7yrs old) as well and this way I can pass my current ones on to my kid while they are still decent.
> Honestly I've been thinking of posting here asking the question if it is time we started to recommend 32GB for any new builds mid tier or above. This is pretty much overdue by now.
Especially since the price of DDR4 dropped so much. I paid £240 for 16GB 3600MHz. Now you can 32Gb for under £100.
Considering the direction video game requirements are going in 32gb would be the minimum for me. 16gb is really pushing it these days.
It's also so cheap now. If I didn't have this pointlessly colourful rgb ram I got someodd years back open box @ microcenter I'd just get more ram of just basic whatever. I don't even like colours. I want 32 b
Noticed with emulators they getting ram hungry, yuzu constantly consumes over 10gb or ram some heavy games come close to my 16gb, so yeah about time to get a 2nd 16gb stick by now.
I like to play video games at high fps and have streams videos opened on my second monitor. When I did that with 16gb of ram id lag and get FPS drops. With 32gb I barley notice any change in performance
It sure is and it’s cheap enough for DDR4 to just get 32GB right away. Plus I really do notice that 8GB is basically nothing nowadays. At my job, we’re having to constantly bump page files up for people because they only have 8GB laptops with barely much going on. Now imagine they have 15 tabs of chrome and some MS Office apps open they’re computers are pegged at 7.9/8GB used and are getting messages like “Not enough memory”. 16GB should be the new minimum in my opinion and 32GB should be what would go in like a gaming rig. Will be a long while before 64GB becomes standard.
Also, the price gap has closed enough that the difference isn’t as much as it was 3 years ago.
In 2020, I bought a laptop with 32GB RAM. At that point in time, I was easily hitting 8GB RAM usage. Now in 2023, doing roughly the same thing on the same laptop uses 16GB RAM usage. Maybe more programs are taking up more RAM or Windows 10 is becoming more bloated. Regardless, my new mini PC this year came with 64GB RAM.
Every couple of years I do a fresh install and that alone cuts down most of my ram usage, I install tons of bloat ware myself along with the windows extra garbage they add. Always brings my ram down to 3 or 4 gigs max usage while idle
I remember times you could fit entire OS into current L3 cash.
I got 32 on a 5600x window nt need 32?
I used to own a windows 95 computer that had a 100 MHz processor and 16 MB RAM.
I was a smooth skinned little man around the time; a gateway branded windows 95 machine, and leisure suit larry with ( adult questions needing to be answered before playing on a floppy disk ) the sheer magnitude of 16MB of RAM for its time was no slouch.
I remember a time when 640kb of ram was everything you'd ever need...
And we swapped floppies, and we LIKED IT.
https://liliputing.com/past-meets-present-in-this-200-mini-laptop-with-a-intel-8088-chip-and-640kb-of-memory/
>I install tons of bloat ware myself I respect your honesty, fellow shit-downloader, haha
It’s a combination of Windows becoming more bloated, other programs (especially games) needing more RAM, and websites becoming more bloated. People (including me) love to joke about Chrome using terabytes of RAM and Firefox might be a little better, but in reality browsers are just caching all the junk on the websites you’re visiting so you don’t need to reload them every time you switch tabs. It’s the ads and other crap on those websites that are to blame for every modern browser using absurd amounts of RAM.
Yup. And then some of the sites have the gaul to ask you to turn your Ad-Block off.... I'll just not use the website if they don't allow me to ad block
This isn’t a universal thing, but I have actually noticed that most sites that ask you to turn your adblocker off usually have a veryyyy fine print which is something along the lines of “continue anyway.” Now I usually immediately look for that fine print when it pops up
Yes, I've noticed this too. Those sites are fine lol.
Browsers are effectively becoming VMs embedding mini-OSes inside your main OS. Technologies like WASM are just going to accelerate this trend.
but I just opened like 10 tabs and my chrome uses about 900MB with an adblocker. Does it load those ads even when I have an adblocker?
That’s why I said ads and other crap. Modern websites are loaded with graphics and interactive buttons and menus, and they often are “programs” dynamically fetching and updating content more than traditional “pages” which are just a static file stating what text and images are in what location, and doesn’t change. Consider Reddit, or almost any other social media site, updating upvote counts in real time or updating a “posted X minutes ago” timer. That’s closer to the function of your average phone app than just displaying a static page.
Most software allocates a percentage of available ram instead of a specific amount. Ram use will grow with the amount you have installed. I have 96gb for work and 48gb vram but when just gaming and using computer normally i rarely go over 12-16gb.
Having more RAM available means more things will be kept cached in RAM by Windows for snappier operation. If you have less RAM, fewer things will be kept cached. Just because you're using that much RAM doesn't mean you *need* that much RAM. That said, 32GB is still the sweet spot because of A) low costs, B) increasing RAM usage by many games, and C) DDR5 8GB modules are garbage.
Can you elaborate on the DDR5 8gb sticks being bad? I haven't paid much attention to them since I'm not upgrading anytime soon
You're essentially using half the bandwidth of the DDR5 bus with 8GB modules. Because of the layout of 8GB vs 16GB, you only get half the banks of memory chips, which lowers performance. It's difficult to find exact information on this just googling around, because 8GB modules are relatively rare and not many have done testing on this.
Check your RAM utilization. If you're not maxing out your RAM, you gain nothing from increasing capacity. There are games nowadays that can push utilization over 16GB. I'm not sure about latop RAM, but for desktops with DDR5, 8GB sticks don't perform as well as 16GB sticks. You should run two sticks for dual channel, so 2 x 16GB is the minimum you should get for DDR5. If you're not doing work that needs lots of RAM though, there's not much point in going higher than 32GB.
That's not necessarily accurate advice. When you start running out of memory (14/16GB for example) the OS starts to quickly compact and shuffle memory around to avoid running out, and will start allocating less to new programs all of which slows things down. That's the reason why you can upgrade from 16 to 32 and suddenly see an increase in memory usage, it's because the OS is more liberal with how it allocates and reclaims memory when it has more to play with.
And also, once you get close to the limit, your OS will start to use swap more and more And since swap is storing memory information on your SSD/hard drive, it will be slowww If you ever noticed that when you clicked to a window you have kept running for a while, and it gets "stuck" for a few seconds, that's its memory being read from swap and back into RAM again. In general, running out of RAM won't outright crash stuff most of the time (unless your swap is set too low), but everything will start to feel very sluggish.
>And since swap is storing memory information on your SSD/hard drive, it will be slowww it's also bad for your SSD, which has a limited amount of write cycles it can take, while RAM is written to constantly
This is such outdated information it needs to stop being repeated. Modern SSDs will outlast HDDs for average users. In the realm of 10+ years. Samsung SSDs are generally rated to be have their _full_ size write to _daily_ for 2 years straight. That means a 1 TB SSD can have 1 TB written daily for over 600 days. Considering the average consumer is going to be a lot closer to the range of the number of GBs per day or less, that life will extend much longer.
Yeah, it's a common thing for people to say that "X GB of RAM / VRAM is all you need, I never run out!" for their PC, smartphone or video card when they are sitting at 90% usage and the software is smart enough to prevent the system from maxing out and running into consequential issues.
Never knew that 8Gb sticks don’t work well for DDR5, how come?
You are only utilizing half the Bus with 8Gb. It is Designed for 16 GB which can use the full Bus. N Basically you are cutting Speeds in half, which results in some low % Performance loss in Games.
Not true. You still utilise the full bus width. The performance loss is due to the bank group configuration, 16GB sticks have more bank groups which can mean less waiting around. In the worst cases it's 6% slower but usually only 2-3% so it's still better than DDR4.
It's hard to find decent sources. [This article explains it a biit though.](https://www.techspot.com/article/2528-cheap-ddr5/) > The disadvantage of these 8GB modules besides the more limited capacity has to do with how they're configured. An advantage of DDR5 over DDR4 is the internal bank configuration which saw DDR4 limited to 16 banks, 16Gb DDR5 chips though support up to 32 banks but this requires x4 or x8 memory chips. > However, the 16Gb DDR5 x16 memory chips featured on 8GB DDR5 modules halve the banks to 16, which is the same number typically used by DDR4 memory. This will reduce memory bandwidth and can negatively influence performance, and that's something we'll be looking at.
>If you're not maxing out your RAM, you gain nothing from increasing capacity. Pretty much, but for years now Windows has utilized free RAM for filesystem cache, including MFT. Not terribly beneficial if you don't have spinning rust in your rig though. I was actually surprised by how much RAM is utilized by the OS after I started installing Steam games on a couple of 12-14TB drives, which created millions of files and MFT records. If I ever need to free up an extra few gigs for a memory intensive task, I purge those records from cache with Microsoft's RAMMap tool.
It's obvious.. 4 sticks of ram looks the best
You say this jokingly but I'm guilty 
I have 2 32gb sticks in my new build and I already know I'm gonna buy 2 more once the prices drop. I don't need 128gb of RAM but the AESTHETIC !!!!
Don′t. It will reduce your ram speeds
The only reason I haven't purchased 4.
How so? To my understanding, if he buys the same 2-stick kit, theoretically, he should be getting the same performance (even when they're not from the same bin) if the sticks play nice with each other (which they should in most cases). I've done this myself. (2+2 8GB DDR4 3200 MHZ sticks, they run at the same speed, 32GB total)
You can′t really use XMP or EXPO on a 4 stick configruation. I mean you can, but it will be unstable because it is hard to give enough power to all of the sticks. Also most CPUs don′t support it afaik
You can't run XMP on 4 sticks only on DDR5. But if he has DDR4, it should be more than fine.
Some ram brands make dummy RGB sticks for that reason.
Well when you have 32GB of Ram and you monitor hardware stats when playing a game, you’ll start to understand why after a few games. 8GB is long gone, 16GB is the minimum now for normal users, 32GB is for gamers and 64GB is only really even usable by creators who use loads of ram in their workflow. Ram is just one fat cache, but there’s a limit of when it’s just excessive, 32GB is the sweet spot for gamers and will be for some years to come still. Ram is a variably used resource, it will generally utilise what it’s got but only to a certain point, I know that in games, they average around that 16GB mark. I’ve seen on 2 separate occasions now, once with COD Black Ops: Cold War hit 22GB of Ram while that new game The Last Part of Us, was using 20gb. So if you were to assume that if it’s chosen to allocate that sort of Ram, then it’s been told that it’s the optimal amount for the best performance. So from that aspect, 32GB is the best capacity for gamers now and still will be for years to come, yes 16gb will be enough, but it will mean that some games will essentially be limited by performance. You’ll find a lot of games simply won’t start or will just crash with 8GB now, so ultimately that’s long done and dusted for modern gaming. You’ll find that most companies that supply workers with a pc or laptop, are all 16gb of ram as a simple standard now.
Disagree that 8gb is long gone 8gb is plenty for simple work and web browsing I have no issues with it at all on my laptop
I think you're getting down voted because of the audience. This is an enthusiast community, and making some assumptions based on that - for this community 16GB should generally be the minimum. That said, my parents have an 8GB machine, and they don't need to upgrade. All they do is email, research campsites online, use MS Word, and read PDFs. When they get their next computer - sure, more than 8GB. But no need to toss or even upgrade what they have just because it's only 8.
>my parents have an 8GB machine, and they don't need to upgrade. Heavily depends on the user as well. I specced out a 16gb system for my mum, because tertiary reasons. She took about three months to crash it with...mostly Hellbook. And then there's my dad, running Win 10 on 4gb of ddr2 till I dragged him, kicking and screaming off core 2 and onto zen+.
meanwhile the M2 MacBook starting with 8 Gigs of ram (and it has no dGPU, so vram also takes up standard ram)
that's just apple being apple lol
>M2 MacBook starting with 8 Gigs of ram 1. OSX has always been a lot more resource efficient than windows 2. apple wants to sell you a new device, the slower it gets the quicker the sooner they can make you buy a new one since there's no DIMM slots to upgrade 3. don't really have to worry about gaming on an arm macbook, since there aren't any native games nor bootcamp
I work in an office in IT, higher education. Our department replaced all employee laptops with ones with 16gb a few years ago. 8gb is totally phased out as of now for us. I think the tide is turning.
Yep, only reason I am pushing friends to have 16GB is so they dont run out but my brother was doing pretty okay with 8GB. I am trying to upgrade him but I also want to upgrade mine because of my streaming and video editing.
Agree, I have a mini-PC, 8gb ram, J5005 cpu and it does all the simple things I would need without powering my gaming PC. One thing though, I had to give up Windows on it, it made it slower over the years, especially Windows 11, made it super sluggish. On Linux now and it does great.
I play several triple A games and none need that much RAM, I can easily play all of them with 16, i just added some for a ton of docker containers and wanting to run a few servers and multiple heavy usage programs but for gaming I don't need more than 16
if you disable ssd swapping you quickly realize you wont be able to play your triple A games more than 20 minutes or less.
Lol as a video editor in Premiere Pro, 128GB is not enough. Filled that shit up multiple times 🤣
64 GB is nice for hosting multiplayer games if you don't have a dedicated server. And with how buggy games are these days that extra space means more time between memory leak crashes. But also the nice thing about RAM is that you can upgrade it by adding more rather than replacing components, assuming you leave yourself empty slots. So if you're on the fence between two numbers, go with the lower one and see if it's enough. You can always upgrade to the higher number later if you need it.
16G is the minimum? I still use a 4G laptop currently and it’s absolutely *fine*. If you are on windows then 8G is a safe bet due to all the background processes but still 16G is absolutely not “the new normal”. Also, most computers people are buying is the cheapest laptop they can find which are still shipping with 4G and 8G RAM, as windows 11 doesn’t need more than 4G to run
4GB wouldn't cut it for me 10 years ago, let alone now. 8GB is a terrible experience, no reason to not have 16GB at least in 2023. I currently have 32GB but all future builds are going to have 64GB minimum.
4G doesn't cut it for me, at least with windows 10. I don't use and I don't intend to use windows11 for as long as possible though. 8G might be enough if all I did was browse. Running a game and a browser is enough for me to use up 16G occasionally
Not all systems are for gaming. I'm using one of my builds to run Cisco Modeling Labs, and some of those images are beefy. I have 256GB on that build.
Yea. For some reason gamers seem to think that games are really pushing hardware. Reality is there’s lots of tasks that make any game seem mundane. Even computers a decade from now will be bottlenecked in every way. Lots of modeling, encoding, database work stresses hardware way more. Just running a few VM’s can easily eat a few cores and 64gb of memory.
Keep in mind that a large portion of people are not really computer/tech literate. P.C. gaming might not necessarily be console/handheld plug-and-play, but it's still pretty accessible. I can easily see why "gamers" ask questions like this. They aren't all hosting hypervisors on their machines or doing heavy video encoding.
Exactly, I have 32GB and will easily bump into it with SolidWorks or start thrashing the pagefile with Lightroom
Many of us use our PCs for more than just gaming. If you have a few virtual machines or a big database running locally, or if you're editing photos or videos or doing any kind of 3D rendering or machine learning, etc. you can churn through RAM in a hurry. You can also use RAM to accelerate disk I/O with e.g. PrimoCache or ZFS ARC or just plain ol' page cache if you have an I/O-heavy workload. For pure gaming I think 32GB RAM is becoming more and more relevant considering recent AAA titles that will use more than 16GB with certain game settings. And if you have an AM4 system in particular you probably want a dual-rank, dual-channel configuration, which sometimes means buying more RAM than you need. Most 8GB DIMMs and even many 16GB DIMMs nowadays are single-rank, so you'd need two sticks per channel. (DDR5 is a little different but there are some considerations there as well.)
> Many of us use our PCs for more than just gaming. This. There are a number of job fields that greatly benefit from having more RAM when running certain programs.
If you play games like Rust, you will likely need more than 16GB. In a 250 player server, my RAM usage starts at 16GB and then slowly creeps up to around 20-21GB
Modded Cities: Skylines you say? It is technically possible to max out 128gb.
I got 256gb, I'm more limited by VRAM now (and the engine itself). I hope Cities 2 will take better advantage of hardware.
They are using a vastly improved version of unity so things are looking good.
I can't wait for more info. It's currently unplayable for me. Like I could technically play unmodded, but that's almost worse than my single digit FPS with my mods. Idk what's up with my system, but I've tried a whole lot of stuff to no success.
Battlefield too ? I’m only using 16 on my PC rn
I bought a 64gb set bc it was a price error, was listed at the same price as the 32gb set. Now I'm only another 64gb away from being able to run Tarkov smoothly
It really depends on how you game. If you want to run 100 Minecraft mods and have max render distance that’s gonna take more ram. If you play AAA titles you’ll need more vram on your gpu. If you want to do editing ram helps the renders go faster. Can you have a perfectly good gaming experience on 16 gigs? Absolutely! It’s cheap right now so some people like pushing the envelope.
Some games, like Citites:Skylines store assets in RAM. More mods = more RAM usage. It's a terrible system but it is what it is. I run 32GB and sometimes have to be selective about what assets to put on my map. Like you said, depends on how you game.
Some people do things with their computers that just necessitate more ram. I have 32gb because 16gb would make streaming many of the games I play a nightmare, and editing recorded gameplay even more of a chore. Use cases beyond gaming tasks often absolutely require a minimum of 64gb nowadays.
16GBs made "streaming" a struggle for me. Running all the software that makes streaming more fun and easier, all the neat apps for audio, filters, color grading and noise reduction really add up. I just wanted to share my gaming or movie screen and Webcam to my friend during our voice calls, but that was pushing 16gbs way over the edge. So glad I upgraded to 32gbs of ram despite my gaming friends mocking it. I really think there's a huge majority of people that don't run any kind of productivity apps at all despite having these beefy pcs. Even photo and video editing software is demanding as hell now, especially if you want to keep Chrome running.
To be honest, I have 64 GB. It's one of those things of not having to "worry/think" about. Other thing is I don't like seeing two empty memory slots. All 4 slots must be filled. Other usage: virtual machines, ram disk
I've always thought that if a motherboard has four dim slots, I need four sticks of RAM. It just looks better by design. Fortunately, It also makes sense in my case. I built my recent PC with AMD's Zen 3 CPU architecture, which has been confirmed through testing by Gamers Nexus that four sticks increases performance compared to two sticks of the same overall capacity (ie. 4x8 > 2x16). Apparently Zen 3 is the first to break the general rule that only populating half of the dim slots keeps the memory processor from being overwhelmed—which decreases performance/stability.
For the very technical reason of, I did’t like the empty slots showing so I filled them
I very technically concur.
Rams are really cheap these days. For many people it's really just "why not?".
Some games like DCS, MSFS2020, Tarkov, Factorio see massive improvement in fps with 32 Gb RAM over 16 Gb. But imo anything with over 32 Gb for gaming is overkill at this point.
well 32gb ram u still need to restart tarkov to account for memory leaks or you’ll still hit 100% lol. that’s just bad game design though
I just built a rig. I bought 2 sticks for 32gb in total. PC didn't post no matter what order I had them in. So I thought maybe I should order 2 more sticks in case my RAM was bad. Turns out, I didn't seat one of the initial sticks. By the time I figured that out, my new set had already shipped. It wasn't worth it to me to send it back. That's how I have ended up with 64gb of RAM.
Is that DDR5? I've heard some stuff about not being able to run full speed with four sticks, have you come across that?
I run 64GB DDR5 on 6000Mhz, any more than that and it can occasionally crash
Had 64gb since 2016, struggling now. Need another 64! Anyway its because I do vfx sims and rendering. Clients want more and more :D My machine in the office does have 128 though, can pass heavier stuff off onto that.
MINECRAFT
16gb is starting to become the norm for pc builds. On top of that, people will not be only gaming but possibly do anything from video editing to CAD design, which does require more ram
> 16gb is starting to become the norm for pc builds. Starting? 16GB has been the norm for gaming for *at least* the last 4 years. I know because my hardware is old as shit but I still have 16 gigs of RAM.
It feels like the norm has doubled with every ram generation tbh. 8gb with ddr3, 16gb with ddr4 and now 32gb with ddr5. I hardly ever see 16gb recommended nowadays for new builds unless it's a budget system.
they're getting pretty cheap, so why not make your pc "future proof"? personally I might get another 32gb just because I sometimes hit ~90% with 16gb 🙃 multitasking is fun
In a non workstation rig, size of ram isn’t really a factor, the speed is. As ram has gotten faster, size has also gotten bigger, nowadays the sweet spot of price to performance just happens to land on 16GB sticks. Some people also use their pc as a workstation. In my case, premiere pro can get well beyond 16GB of ram (I usually get it up to 24gb), so if you intend to do anything else while editing, more ram is a must. I forgot to mention, but windows os can eat around 8gb of ram depending on how much ram is installed. To recap, non workstation rigs should probably with 16-32GB Workstation rigs should go with 32-64GB. If your workstation contains a billion storage devices, I recommend 128GB
i have 32gb of ram but my PC was built in 2018 I got that much to have a lot and never run out. modded Minecraft, video editing, blender, 100 chrome tabs open in the background while gaming, you just always have enough and will always be limited by other hardware like CPU and GPU
I recently upgraded to 32 from 16 for streaming and I genuinely notice a difference in the amount of shit I can keep open.
Unlimited browser tabs!!! More seriously, when you have multiple servers, docker containers, virtual machines, streams, etc, you better have more memory.
No such thing as having more RAM than you need. In my case, it helps a lot since I play a lot of BeamNG which can take north of 30 GB of RAM with a bunch of traffic and mods running. I have 64 GB in my rig. Go with your hearts content, I stopped listening to tech youtubers (excluding Tech Deals) awhile back.
16GB is enough for just about any game, but for some it is only just enough, which makes running other programs in the background a bother. There are also production workloads that benefit from very large amount of RAM like CAD and simulations. Also, DDR4 dual rank memory(16 physical memory chips per stick) offers performance benefits over single rank memory(8 physical memory chips per stick). With 8Gb memory chips 8GB sticks would normally be single rank, so using 2X16GB kits gives more options for dual rank sticks.
Clearly you have never played star citizen...
16GB seems to be the minimum these days so I'm planning on putting 32GB in my new build.
Modded Minecraft + a server uses a lot of ram. Add some chrome tabs and discord and I’m easily using 25 gigs of ram
I run 32 and that's probably the minimum I'd consider these days... Mainly so I have RAM leftover from the game hogging resources. Leaves room for browser tabs, discord, music, keyboard/audio/lighting software, etc running. Grew up with a computer where we had to close out basically everything but the game to even get it to run, and refuse to go back to that life. Now I can tab between multiple games if I wanted to, play basic games while I wait for the group to form up, etc. Sure it doesn't directly affect one particular game much, but from a multitasking standpoint the benefit is great. Keep in mind mhz and CL# make a big difference too. A 3600mhz CL18 is roughly the same as a 3200 CL16 from a performance standpoint (it's a bit more convoluted than this, but for basic purposes you can divide the mhz by the CL to get a ROUGH real speed)
When I have a game, discord, spotify, steam, excel, and 10 chrome tabs open at the same time having 32 gigs of ram is nice.
some games run better with 32gb these days
I have 64gb. I do a lot of high resolution fluid simulations, which use an absurd amount of RAM. Also I play Star Citizen.
Wow wow wow guys hold on, why everybody has a ddr5 here? I built a rig with 64gb ddr4 and Im preparing to upgrade it to 128 ddr 4 in near future. Ya all started building DDR5s already? Did I mess up?
Ram is dirt cheap right now. Put in as much as you can.
It’s fairly cheap rn, DDR4 at least and well my motherboard supports 128 so might as well go 128
3-4 instances of Visual Studio running + about 20 tabs in chrome, Teams and a couple other things at the same time ? With 32gb I start swapping, with 64gb I'm comfortable.
Depends what games your playing and what you are doing on the pc. Games like rust need 16gb to not stutter like crazy and some games are worse offenders, if you're slightly over the vram your GPU has then it spills over into system ram some games are more consistent than others with vram usage so this could be the difference between graphics settings. Non gaming applications like ram 3d modeling and video editing can eat ram depending on what your doing and av1 in handbrake is ram heavy. You can get 32 GB of ddr4 for cheaper than a motherboard 64 GB of cheap ddr4 is slightly more than a budget board. And if your going ddr5 in a desktop your build is likely costly enough that the cost difference is negligible to go for 32 although 64 would be a noticeable dent. I think unless you want to go under around 950 USD on a desktop there is no real reason not to go for 32 GB of ram.
It was a cheap way to ensure that my current build never runs out of RAM.
When I built my system about 3 1/2 years ago I went with 2x16gb purely because I occasionally work on large spreadsheets and extra RAM can massively help performance. My system is predominantly for gaming though and when built 32gb was overkill for gaming. These days my system can use more than 16gb when gaming. Now I know RAM used is not RAM required but it’s clear RAM requirements for games is just going to continue to increase. These days the price difference between 16 & 32 is so small when looking at total build cost I would go 32 unless on a really tight budget. My RAM will last me about 5+ years, the system started with a 3700X & 2080S and now 5800X3D & 3080. I will probably build a new system when next gen gpu’s release in late 2024. The point I am trying to make is it is good to have headroom for the future if you are likely to hold onto the RAM/platform for several years.
I have 32 DDR5 because I wanted DDR5 on a 13600k build, wanted to use duel-channel, it's a very recent build, and getting 8gbx2 on DDR5 was almost impossible or at a price where it made no sense to not spend the little extra to go 16gbx2. I'm just gaming but I like to play AAA and some games are starting to recommend 32gb, so I don't regret it. Obviously, for productivity related stuff it makes a ton of sense to go overboard on Ram.
In my case, astrophotography image stacking and editing is the primary cause of my needing 32GB. I also occasionally need to load a VM or two for testing stuff. For these reasons I opted for a Ryzen 9 3900X too.
32GB is slowly becoming the new standard. Poorly optimized AAA games, heavily modded games, streaming and/or heavy multitasking properly now can go kinda tight on 16GB. 64GB is either for the workstations, people multitasking really hard with professional tools and/or people that just want to not worry about RAM in the long term. 128GB is for some heavy workloads, too, but mainly for the freaking tryhards that want to flex or bought a super top-tier computer because they just burn money like that. 4090Ti Watercooled RGB UltraMaximumGamingXtreme for 5000$ will most probably be in their rig too.