Why I Won’t Use Less than 32GB of RAM

[QwerkyPengwen]

Since I only game and live stream with my PC and am not doing anything with video editing yet, I'm fine with my 16GB at the moment.

However, I will definitely upgrade to 32GB when one of these two things happens:
#1 - at current, only a couple of new titles are now having 16GB as the recommended amount of RAM, and once 16GB starts being not enough for recommended specs (not minimum but the one higher than that) then I'll upgrade.

Or

#2 - I start getting into video editing and doing some content creation and will be working with 1440p recordings in lossless for my PC, and 4K Log videos shot using my LG V30

 

[Dmonphx]

As a visual designer i can attest get as much ram as toy can. I currently runt 128gb of ram and love the feeling of not having to stress aboit resources.

 

[JamesSneed]

I went with 32GB Gskil Flarex CL14 3200Hz. Get decently better performance with Ryzen using dual bank per channel due to interleaving. I planned to have this Ryzen 1800x last me until Zen3 which I'm hoping i can socket right into my x370 board mid 2020. If all works out I may have this system another 5 years and 32GB will have likely been a good choice. So I went with 32GB so I didn't have to worry about memory for the life of this system which is going to likely be pretty long.

 

[roadtrip1098]

I use 32GB and would even go higher with things like MSI's RAM-drive where you allocate a chunk of RAM to use as a storage drive for temporary work. It saves your ssd's from bearing the brunt of all the read writes and makes video editing and 3d modeling silky smooth. The read speeds on a ram drive absolutely smoke even the fastest PCIe ssd's getting 9300-9700MB/s on ram drive vs 3000-3500 on a 1TB PCIe 3 x4 SSD.

 

[InvalidError]

i went with 32 GB when it cost $200 in Feb 2017, but 8-12 months later it was $400.

I paid $180 for 32GB in late 2012. Would have been ~$150 if I bought only a month or two earlier. Pulled the trigger on upgrading when I saw RAM prices starting to creep up, fearing it would be a big one, and it was. The memory I bought peaked at ~$250 for 16GB half a year later.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

meanwhile my celeron netbook has 2gb ram

 

[InvalidError]

meanwhile my celeron netbook has 2gb ram

And here I am thinking I'm not buying another Android device with less than 4GB RAM... I hate how I can barely keep two things open at once on my Galaxy A8 but can't be bothered to spend $300+ on a mobile device I may accidentally break at any time.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Lol my phone has 2gb ram.

My pc has only 8gb

 

[songoku619]

I have to have 32gb ram because I like to keep things I don't need running in the background is basically what this article is all about. It's like needing a truck so you can take your wardrobe and fridge with you when you go to buy groceries. But of course, just in case.

 

[MarkHughes]

I use 32GB in my dev and personal systems. As I write this my dev machine is sat at 50% use. That will go up once I get busy again. I know I could manage things better as some posters suggest however when I am working I really have more important stuff to do than thinking about my computers ram and how I should manage it. On my personal machine that runs Linux and is also used for development on my personal projects the 32GB it has is overkill. My Mrs using the same Dell XPS could probably get by on 8 for her work.

 

[Rdslw]

I run 32GB ram from SODIMM's (laptop) so I know why he said what he said. Ram became cheap for that quantity and if you waste CPU cycles because of IO waits, its not worth to cheap out on that.
Helping material:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...istic-curve.svg/1200px-Logistic-curve.svg.png
Your performance is somewhere on that curve, depending on how much ram you need and how much you have.
Over certain point, there is almost no gain. But cost of ram is one time cost.
32GB of ram costs ~200$
16GB of ram costs ~100$
8GB of ram costs ~$33.95
and lets say you earn ~4000$ for easier math.
if you waste 20 seconds each workday on loading times (which is optimistic) counting its 8h, its 0.00073099 of your pay, so its 3$ - 6$ a month. So it pays out in 3 years, under the new hardware amortization time.
If you cheap out to use 4 GB of ram, and waste ~15 min a day on loading times, you would payback 8GB stick in 1-4 months. depending on yout workload

 

[LordConrad]

I don't multi-task, I rarely have more than two apps/tabs open at once. However, I do a fair amount of transcoding so my main computer (and my Windows laptop) never has less than 32GB RAM. My other 3 desktops and my MacBook Pro all have 16GB.

 

[dcvikes]

32GB DDR4 3200 here with a 3700x CL15. It's a dev / game testing machine.

 

[fadingfool]

I went from 16 GB to 32 GB not too long ago. Mainly so I could take advantage of quad channel (i7 7820X based system) . Haven't noticed any difference day to day but I am getting lazy in closing down programs I am not using......

 

[daglesj]

I just dunno where all this cheap RAM is coming from. To go from my 4x4GB DDR4 3000 Corsair set to a 4x8GB DDR4 3200 set is £282!! If I went for the 3000 set its still £200.

I got the 4x4GB set for £80 back in may 2016, now THAT was when RAM was cheap...kids today...

 

[InvalidError]

I just dunno where all this cheap RAM is coming from. To go from my 4x4GB DDR4 3000 Corsair set to a 4x8GB DDR4 3200 set is £282!! If I went for the 3000 set its still £200.

Here is an example of cheap RAM for you:
https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-32gb...0&cm_re=32gb_ddr4-3200-_-20-232-885-_-Product
Between the exchange rate and the UK's baked-in taxes, that would be about the same amount in GBP and 20-25% cheaper per GB than your current RAM.

 

[vuhuynh]

Why would I want to do that when, for the $60 price difference, I can run all of those processes at once? It's not like I'm starved for CPU or storage resources

Dear Crashman,

I understand that for $60 you can get the extra RAM to run all these processes. But can you focus in all of these things going on on your screen(s) ?

Once again, this is just my opinion and please don't be offend by my comment. Thanks for your post and sharing.

 

[InvalidError]

I understand that for $60 you can get the extra RAM to run all these processes. But can you focus in all of these things going on on your screen(s) ?

I'm a somewhat heavy multi-tasker and the point of having 32GB of RAM isn't "focusing on all these things", it is not having to wait for a few seconds every time I tab out of one program to look something up or change something elsewhere because the other program I'm looking for got swapped out to reclaim RAM. With only 16GB of RAM, those seconds at a time add up to several minutes a day, especially if the programs I have to tab through to get to the one I'm looking for have also been swapped out and get re-loaded, causing more stuff that I may be coming back to next to get evicted from RAM.

 

[jmcgaw]

Meh. I have 32gB and have had it for a few years now. I thought that it would be a big help so when the proper memory sticks went on special I ordered them and doubled my memory. Know what? I have yet to see my memory usage grow enough to justify it -- it sits at around 26% right now and that is with some fairly memory intensive tasks running. Maybe if I was trying to juggle a dozen heavy media apps/files simultaneously the memory might come in handy but for my everyday use it is wasted. Of course the memory was so cheap at the time...

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Meh. I have 32gB and have had it for a few years now. I thought that it would be a big help so when the proper memory sticks went on special I ordered them and doubled my memory. Know what? I have yet to see my memory usage grow enough to justify it -- it sits at around 26% right now and that is with some fairly memory intensive tasks running. Maybe if I was trying to juggle a dozen heavy media apps/files simultaneously the memory might come in handy but for my everyday use it is wasted. Of course the memory was so cheap at the time...

just because you don't use it or know what to do with it doesn't mean it's useless. maybe it is for you, but still it's great because the last thing you want is to run out of ram

 

[TR0767]

I have 32GB.
Then again, I routinely run a few VM's simultaneously. 4-6-8GB RAM each sucks up RAM quickly.

So do I!

 

[Ninjawithagun]

Well, looks like I'm late to the party. Another bad article posted on Tom's that was written by someone who isn't so smart at all about how to manage their software. If all you do is game, 16GB is plenty of RAM for your needs. If you are a power user, the recommendation is more system memory, but only if the software you are using demands that more than 16GB is necessary in order to fully optimize the functionality. Not all software requires more system memory, but rather that your video card meet certain minimum specifications such as a specific GPU architecture (e.g,, Pascal, Turing, etc.) in order to be better optimized for CUDA processing, and more VRAM may be necessary in order to buffer larger amounts of imagery or video data. Bottom line, this article was badly written.

 

[R4DIO4CT1VE]

ram requirements aren't the same for people playing fortnite and people running professional software or virtual machines? wow crazy

 

[cseaton79]

I do photogrammetry/geospatial data processing and we use 128 GB in most of our desktop builds (X299). Large projects routinely use 100+ GB, I simply could not do these projects w/ 64 GB or less. I can see us moving to 256 GB eventually and it's not too crazy to think I might be using 1TB+ someday.

 

[KHoolMan]

It really depends on what you do with your computer. Looks like the author of the article are using some pretty heavy stuff (video editing) and also have a ton of tabs open in multiple browsers.

32 GB (or even 16 GB) would be a waste of money for regular "Joe" or "Jane" who use their computer to browse the web, watch YouTube, or type a few documents here and there. The average user also usually only sticks with one browser.

(OK, you can argue all that can be done one a phone or a tablet. Those are fine if you are using it for a short time. Try to type a document on a phone or tablet for longer then 10 minutes and you will know what I mean. Bigger screen is better!)

As for me, I have 16 in my laptop. My wife's has 12 and most of the rest of the computers at home has 8, although some only have 6. All computers are equipped with SSDs though. We are done with the old and slow mechanical hard drives. Even with a system with 8 GB, it's fine. It runs smooth. Even if you are swapping (rarely) with an SSD - you won't really feel it.

So yeah, for the average Joe and Jane, 32 GB (even 16 GB) is a waste of money. (OK ... gamer ... developer ... video editor ... CAD users ... heavy users ... yes go ahead and get your 32 GB.)