16gb ram in the real world

[adambeau]

I upgraded from 8gb to 16gb of ram thinking that it might increase my performance but tbh i haven't noticed any changes and am wondering why i even spent the extra 50$.

Please keep in mind i am strictly a gamer/pc enthusiast but i am by no means a techie since my only goal is to run new games at max settings...

Do you think it will make a difference for the games im playing (Guild Wars 2, Smite, D3, BF3, etc.) if i remove 8gb of ram and put it into my backup pc? (it only has 4 and i know going from 4 to 8 makes a HUGE difference!)

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks

-Adam

 

[jaquith]

Today and for Gaming 8GB is the minimum recommended and some 64-bit games can benefit from >8GB but barely. BF3 in total (3.5GB Game, 3GB Shared for GPU(s), and 1GB OS and background) needs 8GB of RAM. As games get more demanding so will RAM (memory) requirements.

Nice link - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ram-memory-upgrade,2778-8.html

 

[adambeau]

Best answer selected by adambeau.

 

[adambeau]

Pretty much exactly what i expected to hear, probably won't be too long until im playing games that will make use of it!! until then.. 8gb it is!

 

[CaedenV]

Before upgrading Ram, look to see in your system where the bottleneck is. Get into task manager or resource manager and see how much memory is being used, and how much you have available. If you have less than ~20% of memory available in your system, then it is time to upgrade.
Typically high end games will eat up ~5GB of ram in total. This means that 4GB is really not enough, but 8GB is effectively overkill, and 16GB is really unnecessary (for now at least). But if your system has a lot of background processes, or you are a very heavy multi-tasker, then moving up to 16GB of ram would be a good call.

For a real world example:
My wife's PC has 4GB of ram, and typical usage is 1.2GB idle, or 2-3GB when working (office and web).
My PC has 16GB of ram, idle is 2GB (too many background processes), web and office 3GB, gaming is ~4-6GB, and video editing (what it was made for) is 12-20GB and it eats into virtural memory a bit, which sits on my SSD so it is not exactly a crippling issue like it use to be when I had a HDD.

Again, check and see if the other system need the memory. System memory makes a night and day difference if you are out of it, but if you have even slightly more memory than is needed, then it makes little to no difference at all.

 

[nikorr]

This topic has been closed by Nikorr