What do people use 16GB of RAM for?

[NamelessAndrew]

I have a laptop with 16GB of RAM and I've never seen it use more than 4GB. So I decidet to run a little test. I opened 4 browser windows, played a youtube video and had music playing in the backround while I was installing a game. That only took 7GB. Why would you ever even need 16GB?

 

[Kiril1512]

For video/image editing, rendering, other heavy stuff like programing... Also in virtualization is very helpful.

 

[Joseph DeGarmo]

Video rendering, multiple OS's on virtual drives, etc.

 

[Wolfshadw]

Exactly what these folks are saying. Ever try converting a 12GB HD video file with only 8GB of RAM? Start it up, come back tomorrow!

-Wolf sends

 

[littlebloke]

When rendering video, my memory use can quickly exceed 10GB

 

[ss202sl]

To brag about how much ram they have in their gaming system even though deep down inside they know that more than 8 is just wasted.

 

[HEXiT]

if your not doing a lot of productivity then 8 gig is more than enough. but like the others have said if you do a lot of video/ music/ photo manipulation you will benefit from more ram.

 

[InvalidError]

I have 32GB RAM simply because I have tons of programs open all the time that end up using ~20GB and I hate waiting for them to get swapped out when I tab into them.

When I built my PC, RAM cost only $90 for 16GB and $180 is the least I have ever spent on RAM in one of my PCs: on my Core2, I paid $250 for the first 4GB I put in it and another $150 for the next 4GB two years later.

At the current $150/16GB, I may have thought twice about jumping to 32GB but at $90 per pair, I figured I might as well max it out while memory was abnormally inexpensive to avoid regretting not doing so later.

 

[maddogfargo]

In addition to the above, with enough RAM you can turn swap file off. This lowers read/write cycles to your HDD or SSD and keeps everything running from your super-fast system RAM.

I haven't had a swap file in 2 years.

 

[jsmithepa]

32GB Ram = hibernate must be b***h 😉

 

[InvalidError]

32GB Ram = hibernate must be b***h 😉

Surprisingly enough, it isn't that bad.

If you enable the swapfile with 16GB fixed size, Windows will copy infrequently accessed or modified memory pages to HDD during idle time so they are already written if pages need to get evicted from RAM and only application memory which has not been written to the page file needs to get dumped to the hibernate file, so hibernate only takes 10-20 seconds instead of the few minutes it would take to dump the entire memory content to disk on-demand. As a bonus, I can also get away with the hibernate file size set to 50% of installed RAM.

Another reason for not turning off the swapfile is that some programs explicitly reserve memory against the swapfile and when there is none, they either start to misbehave or run poorly.

 

[velo3100]

16gigs are only needed for heavy intense programs like 3d rendering, image and video editing and programming.