Do You Really Need More Than 6 GB Of RAM?

[royale606]

oh yea, that 4200+ is at home, at work it's a Core2Duo.. but they run about the same for all intents and purposes..

 

[Guest]

I would like to point out that I am a C++ Developer the intel Mac Pro tower that I am sitting at now waiting for the app I am currently working on to finish its build time and I am pushing 29gb used out of 32 and most of that an 6 out of the 8 cores is used just for my dev tools, and my laptop just got its 8gb upgrade... so really 3gb all you will ever need? I say bull when the average os is taking up 700-1gb of ram just to stay running 3gb is really just the min you want to get by with in this day and age as no one wants to go replacing there PC every month.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]greatdragon[/nom]I would like to point out that I am a C++ Developer the intel Mac Pro tower that I am sitting at now waiting for the app I am currently working on to finish its build time and I am pushing 29gb used out of 32 and most of that an 6 out of the 8 cores is used just for my dev tools, and my laptop just got its 8gb upgrade... so really 3gb all you will ever need? I say bull when the average os is taking up 700-1gb of ram just to stay running 3gb is really just the min you want to get by with in this day and age as no one wants to go replacing there PC every month.[/citation]

The real question was "how much do you need NOW" and the answer was "unless you're running a special application that you already know needs more, you probably won't use more than 3GB". Your description...running a special scenario that you already knew would require more...just validates that half of the equation. The other half...average user under typical scenarios, was benchmarked.

 

[Guest]

One thing I'd like see benchmarked, is running Virtual Machines. I don't know about regular users, but in the developers community, the need to run multiple operating systems at the same time is ever increasing.

 

[zinabas]

well at the current moment I'm running an XP pro 32-bit system with 1GiB of RAM and even browsing I can use 800 megs without effort, so playing a game without a Firefox window open in the background is usually pushing the limits.

I don't know where the point at which additional RAM becomes useless for me, but 3GiB sounds suspiciously low given that some of the older games I play can still stress my system with bad load times.

 

[otivaeey]

Too much ram consumes much power, because they need power to retain memory.

 

[Guest]

I have 144 gb of DDR3 ram

 

[Guest]

Just curious is anti-virus software loaded into your test sets and can you run a full anti-virus scan while doing your tests? That would be a more optimal test for real world systems that most of the people have?

 

[Guest]

I'm hard put to give a damn about what suits the 'typical user.' These are the people buying whatever is on the shelf at Best Buy. But it should be noted that systems with less than 4 GB are disappearing from the Best Buy shelves. Anything over US $600 is likely to have 6-8 GB of RAM and even the lower priced bargain basement systems have 4 GB. Those with less are likely to have older CPUs a THG reader would not consider for their primary desktop.

I just priced out a new Core i7 yesterday based on what was in the Friday Fry's ad as a possible replacement to a existing machine that has been threatening to fail. 6 GB kits of 1366 RAM were all of $80. For that much I'm going to stuff all of the slots just because I can. The user has a single native 64-bit app that will happily consume all of the resources offered. Making that app faster is so important to the user that it doesn't matter if not a single other app runs any better than it would in a maxxed 32-bit system. Cumulatively, they will see benefit but getting that one 64-bit app running faster is all that is needed to justify spending up to a $1,000 on the system than would otherwise be justified.

This will happen for 'typical users' within the lifetime of machines they're buying today. Don't forget, those users expect their machines to be their one and only Pc for far long than I'd expect of most THG readers. So I'd have no problem encouraging them to spend a bit more now to get the full use of their purchase as the software evolves. Enough new machines are shipping as 64-bit systems, including OS, this year to get developers a lot more interested in doing 64-bit versions of their apps in the near future. We've turned the corner in the consumer market, if only because retailers need to be able to advertise ever larger numbers.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]annon[/nom]Just curious is anti-virus software loaded into your test sets and can you run a full anti-virus scan while doing your tests? That would be a more optimal test for real world systems that most of the people have?[/citation]

It's mentioned that an AV scan is the WORST type of test because it ties up the hard drive. You can't get any consistency with the hard drive thrashing.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]epobirs[/nom]I'm hard put to give a damn about what suits the 'typical user.' These are the people buying whatever is on the shelf at Best Buy. But it should be noted that systems with less than 4 GB are disappearing from the Best Buy shelves. Anything over US $600 is likely to have 6-8 GB of RAM and even the lower priced bargain basement systems have 4 GB. Those with less are likely to have older CPUs a THG reader would not consider for their primary desktop.I just priced out a new Core i7 yesterday based on what was in the Friday Fry's ad as a possible replacement to a existing machine that has been threatening to fail. 6 GB kits of 1366 RAM were all of $80. For that much I'm going to stuff all of the slots just because I can. The user has a single native 64-bit app that will happily consume all of the resources offered. Making that app faster is so important to the user that it doesn't matter if not a single other app runs any better than it would in a maxxed 32-bit system. Cumulatively, they will see benefit but getting that one 64-bit app running faster is all that is needed to justify spending up to a $1,000 on the system than would otherwise be justified.This will happen for 'typical users' within the lifetime of machines they're buying today. Don't forget, those users expect their machines to be their one and only Pc for far long than I'd expect of most THG readers. So I'd have no problem encouraging them to spend a bit more now to get the full use of their purchase as the software evolves. Enough new machines are shipping as 64-bit systems, including OS, this year to get developers a lot more interested in doing 64-bit versions of their apps in the near future. We've turned the corner in the consumer market, if only because retailers need to be able to advertise ever larger numbers.[/citation]

The test were optimized for TYPICAL USE PATTERNS OF AVERAGE THG READERS and recommended 6GB of RAM anyway, so you've disqualified your opinion.

You hear a lot of people talking about crazy applications that hardly anyone uses: It's not because these are popular amoung THG readers, it's because exceptional readers will point out why they are exceptional. Their exceptions are being considered for future reviews, but 1 out of 1000 readers is only 0.1%

 

[warriorpoet]

*ahem*

There are more than a million users of Finale annually. Most of them have a very basic idea of what a computer does. Finale is not a crazy niche product.

Why did I focus on that particular program? It's the wildest of the rather mild multi-tasking setup I referred to above. You know, the one that easily exceeded 4Gb.

6Gb is fine for most applications in my experience, but why upgrade to 6Gb in a DDR2 machine when an upgrade to 8Gb costs less than $75 for a total RAM replacement? 6Gb is a decent baseline i7 (tri-channel) recommendation for now. There is absolutely no reason to recommend that particular number for dual-channel systems.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]warriorpoet[/nom]*ahem*There are more than a million users of Finale annually. Most of them have a very basic idea of what a computer does. Finale is not a crazy niche product.Why did I focus on that particular program? It's the wildest of the rather mild multi-tasking setup I referred to above. You know, the one that easily exceeded 4Gb.6Gb is fine for most applications in my experience, but why upgrade to 6Gb in a DDR2 machine when an upgrade to 8Gb costs less than $75 for a total RAM replacement? 6Gb is a decent baseline i7 (tri-channel) recommendation for now. There is absolutely no reason to recommend that particular number for dual-channel systems.[/citation]

I get by with 3.2GB accessible RAM.

If all 1m Finale users were THG readers, they would be a significant portion of readership. Could you plz invite them?

 

[Guest]

@shades_aus

Looks something a bit like this
http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=560 (16 ram slots)
http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=634 (18 ram slots)

 

[dark_lord69]

I'm running 4GB but my motherboard sucks so Windows XP (32 bit) only sees 2.5 GB. Windows 7 (64 bit) on the other hand sees all 4 GB.
(It's an odd limitation, something to do with the motherboard. As warned by the manufacturer on thier site.)

 

[nukemaster]

I'm running 4GB but my motherboard sucks so Windows XP (32 bit) only sees 2.5 GB. Windows 7 (64 bit) on the other hand sees all 4 GB.
(It's an odd limitation, something to do with the motherboard. As warned by the manufacturer on thier site.)

What are your system specs?
If you have a memory remap feature and are on a 32 bit OS it should be set to OFF in the bios.
Any addressable memory such as that on your video card(and other cards) will be taken off the 4 gigabyte limit on 32 bit OS's

 

[Guest]

This test is ridiculous, what SHOULD be added to the results is a suite of 64 bit operating system tests, and High memory usage applications (Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, Audition).

 

[airborne11b]

[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom]It's generally accepted that XP uses less RAM than Vista, so you should be fine with 4GB (which, with 32-bit XP, will yield around 3GB of usefull address space).[/citation]

the tests you see here were done on "Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1"

3GB is 100% great for vista too, not just XP. The point I really took from this article is that 3GB great for games, 6GB is slight overkill (but looking toward the future just in case a super ram requiring game comes out) and anyone who's dumb enough to put 12GB into a "gaming rig" is a moron lol. Well maybe not a "moron", but just largely uninformed.

 

[Guest]

Well you are talking mainly about Windows, but what about Linux, BSD, QNS, and anyother better than really Micro and very Soft aplications ...!?!

Really Micro and very Soft long time suggested for people to upgrade to better windows ..... Windows X!

 

[Guest]

I have used a computer set with 8 GB RAM to process imagens using some algorithms and I must say it is not enough! It depends on how you're going to use your computer for. If is just for fun, 4Gb+ is too much and probably wouldnt even be used by the OS, but if you use it for serious working, specially dealing with big files and parallel computing, than 8 gb could even be not enought.

 

[dfour]

Congratulations to the reviewers at Toms Hardware for recognising that good system design\balance is much more important then any individual component (if your running 32bit Windows don’t go above 3Gbit of ram coz you’re just wasting your money). Most systems can get a 20-30% performance improvement by replacing\upgrading a single component, the key being able to identify that bottleneck. Maybe TH can run a story on system design and bottleneck identification so we can all save some money.

 

[dfour]

Let's face it in 24 months those high-end motherboards you have are not going to support DDR4 RAM, PCI-E 3.0, Intel i8 CPU, AMD Phenom III not to mention SATA III or USB 3.0. So that excess ram will be redundant

 

[jpitts]

any mac test?

 

[kinless]

I have 12GB in my Mac Pro. As a web developer, I run several instances of virtual environments (Vista, XP, 2000, Linux) on top of Mac OS X so I can test for different browsers, particularly IE since it doesn't allow multiple versions to run on one installation).

Keeping an eye on my memory activity monitor, I use over 75% of that RAM, and that's with minimal settings for each environment. I'm probably going to upgrade to 20GB of RAM pretty soon so I can increase RAM settings in all my environments (since I do graphic and developmental work in a few of them).

I'm the anecdotal exception. Most casual users probably won't need more than 6GB.

 

[Guest]

They should recommend having 640kb of RAM. Because even professional applications will never need more.