Why I Won’t Use Less than 32GB of RAM

[uguv]

In the days pre-kids I had a home lab with ESXi, active directory, etc, but I doubt too many people would have a desire to do that. Aside from use-cases like the author's or technical freelancing types, I wonder how common it is for people to mix work and personal computer use.

My work PC has 32 GB in it, and I need it, but at home I'm fine with 16 GB. When I work from home using personal hardware, it involves opening a horizon client and connecting to a machine in the office. I'd think limited remote access to company resources would be the standard these days to deal with issues such as security and DLP.

 

[sunk818]

Are we relegated to desktops in this article?

On the laptop side, the RAM options are more limited:

My Enterprise Dell laptop maxes out at 16GB. Newer Dell laptops wants $160 more to go from 16GB to 32GB (Latitude 15" 5290)
MacBook Pro 13-in goes to 16GB, but if you want 32GB RAM, you need to get the 15-in version which will raise your cost $800.

 

[setx]

Instead of saying "you need more than 16GB of RAM" it's more fair to say "modern programs (especially browsers) are really bad at RAM consumption and almost no one cares".

I remember good old Opera that was able to keep 100 tabs open and active while consuming just a bit over 1GB of RAM. Of course those were ad-blocked tabs and no video, but still extremely impressive by modern browser "standards".

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Instead of saying "you need more than 16GB of RAM" it's more fair to say "modern programs (especially browsers) are really bad at RAM consumption and almost no one cares".

I remember good old Opera that was able to keep 100 tabs open and active while consuming just a bit over 1GB of RAM. Of course those were ad-blocked tabs and no video, but still extremely impressive by modern browser "standards".

Over the years, PCs programs have gotten more advanced, and the requirements to run these programs have gotten steeper.

A Pentium 4 and 2gb ram could browse the web fine in 2005, but now you need a better CPU and more ram to browse the web smoothly.

 

[InvalidError]

I remember good old Opera that was able to keep 100 tabs open and active while consuming just a bit over 1GB of RAM. Of course those were ad-blocked tabs and no video, but still extremely impressive by modern browser "standards".

It isn't just ads that are taking more browser resources, most websites also have also gone from being mostly static pages to having several times more tracking scripts so google, fb, twitter, twitch, snapchat, instagram, etc. can all track and monetize everything you do, dynamic elements, streaming data feeds, animation and transition effects, a boatload more images, etc.

With everyone from servers to client having more processing-power and bandwidth, website designers can't be bothered with computational efficiency anywhere near as much when they can sacrifice efficiency for convenience.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

I don't think I've ever seen my ram usage go above 60%, most of the time its way below that, and I'm on 16GB. I'd say for gaming and typical usage 16gb is still the sweet spot. It would be only if sing your pc for a lot of multitasking VM's, high res content editing etc that 32gb may be worth while.

 

[daglesj]

Here is an example of cheap RAM for you:
https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820232885?Description=32gb ddr4-3200&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.

Nope...I want quad channel! I need 4x8.

 

[PavelCZ]

I disagree with article. I think it is a <Mod Edit> at least based on my experience. For most users 16 GB is more than enough. I have a gaming PC and doing all sort of things including editting photos and videos, etc. In background I am collecting statistics using AIDA logging about whole system resources usage. The highest usage of RAM I ever had was 12 GB! However people here in comments having 32 GB are using VM as I can see so for them it might makes sense.

 

[daglesj]

I disagree with article. I think it is a bullsh*t<Mod Edit> at least based on my experience. For most users 16 GB is more than enough. I have a gaming PC and doing all sort of things including editting photos and videos, etc. In background I am collecting statistics using AIDA logging about whole system resources usage. The highest usage of RAM I ever had was 12 GB! However people here in comments having 32 GB are using VM as I can see so for them it might makes sense.

Yeah 95% of folks have zero use for VMs. Basically the folks saying they need more then 16GB are essentially using or should be using a workstation. Most folks I know out there in usual PC support land would be still well catered for with 6GB max. If they have a SSD (most do now) then even 4GB still gets the job done for day to day casual non gaming use.

 

[InvalidError]

If they have a SSD (most do now) then even 4GB still gets the job done for day to day casual non gaming use.

Unless your PC is mostly ornamental, having 4GB of RAM will cause the swapfile to burn through the SSD"s write endurance pretty quickly under moderate use, especially when you have 1GB of that RAM is locked away by the IGP as you would in most low-end prebuilt systems.

 

[DragonWolf5589]

I'm currently stuck with 8gb due to budget and yet seems perfectly fine running 20 tabs in 2 browsers and plex server..

 

[NightHawkRMX]

I run 8gb in my personal system due to budget.

8gb ram runs fine in my nas, althougb it rarily does anything other than backups. Currently it needs a new psu.

8gb runs fine for my gaming system, although it does get near 100% usage on demanding games.

Heck, my HTPC laptop runs a Celeron N3060 and 2gb ram and is fine. Windows is unbearable, however with linux it is fast enough and runs 1080p youtube excellently.

 

[daglesj]

Unless your PC is mostly ornamental, having 4GB of RAM will cause the swapfile to burn through the SSD"s write endurance pretty quickly under moderate use, especially when you have 1GB of that RAM is locked away by the IGP as you would in most low-end prebuilt systems.

Oh no have we dropped back to 2011?!? Not a concern in 99.99% of domestic systems. An SSD wears out after 5+ years? Oh no that's a £20 cost! Terrifying.

Some folks need to stop assuming everyones elses needs and usage by their own. I'm a local domestic and small business IT tech. I see the real world IT situation most days. It's not all 42VMs running off 50TB of storage while transcoding 8K video while and trying to run a few rounds of Fortnite.

A lot of folks just run a couple of Firefox tabs...amazing I know but it happens a lot out there in normal land.

 

[InvalidError]

Oh no have we dropped back to 2011?!? Not a concern in 99.99% of domestic systems. An SSD wears out after 5+ years? Oh no that's a £20 cost! Terrifying.

My mother's laptop has 8GB of RAM, 2GB of which is used by the IGP and most of the remaining 6GB is used up with only Facebook loaded in Chrome and FB Gameroom opened. With only 4GB of RAM (3GB usable assuming 1GB locked down by IGP), a "$20 SSD" would likely get worn out much sooner than five years from swapping.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

8gb ram and an ssd can save an old laptop.

My moms old laptop. I5 3337u, 8gb ram (factory dual channel), and a 750gb hdd.

It got so unbearably slow it was unusable.

I gave her the option. Let me chuck in an ssd for cheap or buy a new laptop with an ssd.

Ended up getting a laptop with a 660p nvme and i threw an ssd in the old one temporarily.

Almost as good as a brand new laptop.

 

[Komomu]

The reason 16GB is the sweet spot is that they are specifying the sweet spot for gaming and nothing more. Maybe some twitch streaming as well but what you're doing isn't what they are talking about.

Of course if you're doing that much with your rig then you should be going for 32gb. Not sure who ever said to not get 32gb if you're doing more than gaming.

 

[captaincharisma]

all computer users are not video editors, mining crypto currency, or running 5 virtual machines while having 1000 tabs open in a web browser

i don't know if the editior was desperate to get an article out or this was meant to be some form of advertising. either way it is not a good article or debate

 

[USAFRet]

all computer users are not video editors, mining crypto currency, or running 5 virtual machines while having 1000 tabs open in a web browser

i don't know if the editior was desperate to get an article out or this was meant to be some form of advertising. either way it is not a good article or debate

Exactly.
For me, 32GB is creeping in to "Not Enough".
For my wife, 8GB is just fine.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

all computer users are not video editors, mining crypto currency, or running 5 virtual machines while having 1000 tabs open in a web browser

i don't know if the editior was desperate to get an article out or this was meant to be some form of advertising. either way it is not a good article or debate

After all, this is a mostly a "power user" forum.

Although I can get by with a minimal amount of ram just fine.

 

[WINTERLORD]

so wait, running extra ranks of memory is faster?

 

[InvalidError]

so wait, running extra ranks of memory is faster?

More ranks of memory makes it more difficult to achieve higher clocks and tighter timings since there are more chips on the data and address/control bus. Depending on the software's memory access patterns though, more ranks can also mean more chances of memory accesses not needing to close an open row. As with everything performance-related, results vary from one program or game to the next.

 

[KaihatsuJai]

Mixing ram is not a suggested practice. Best to buy in a kit/set and there hasn't been 24gb kits since triple channel made it's short appearance.

As long as it's the same make/model 2x8 runs fine paired with 2x16.

 

[KaihatsuJai]

Upgraded from 8 to 24GB when I got my Oculus Rift 2 years ago (It's a capable 5 year old OC build).

I was shocked to see my memory use immediately go above 10 GB at startup.

It only goes above 16 with VR or games running, but that's without optimization.

Having the extra headroom means you don't have to think about it so much, but CPU usage may become an issue at that point anyway.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Exactly. With RAM more is ALWAYS better no matter what you do

 

[The Net Avenger]

Ideally, more RAM is always great.

My two cents.

However, we are talking about Windows here, not OS X, and not Android that have far less optimal memory management technologies.

This is also a bit misleading for 'general' users. People here at Tom's should have more RAM, but that doesn't mean the average user needs more than 4GB or 8GB of RAM. Even 16GB of RAM for Tom's readers that are power users and are gamers is plenty of RAM.

Again, if cost is not an issue, more RAM is better, as the one 'benchmark' that it improves is predictive launching of software, as Windows will have the software and content in the RAM cache.

How you are reading RAM usage in your system is a representation of performance.

First let us take Firefox and Chrome Browsers, that WHEN RAM IS AVAILABLE, will retain the cache/bitmap rendering of the page. However, when flipping tabs, this cached information is often outdated, and even when it isn't, loading this cached information from an average SSD happens FASTER than the browser checks if the data is outdated or has changed dynamically. (Notice that many of the memory optimization and battery optimizations to Chrome to reduce RAM usage, have also increased the speed of Chrome.)

Essentially, if Chrome and Firefox or Edge are running on 64GB of RAM, they will use a major chunk of the 64GB, that doesn't mean they run any faster. If they are running on an 8GB system, they will use a large portion as well, but will perform the same, even if you are juggling 100s of tabs.

The other issue with reading RAM as you are, is similar, as with Windows, a lot of the OS loads and unloads itself dynamically, for 99% of users, there is no performance from Windows, whether the OS is not unloading anything and using 3.5GB of RAM, or is unloading nearly everything and only using 800MB of RAM.

This is one reason the footprint and RAM requirements on Windows are sharply different than OSX, Android or Linux. Windows was always designed around dynamic linking and paging to virtual RAM, and does this really well, in fact so well that with an average SSD, the performance difference to most users with active content paged and staying in RAM is less than a half a second per minute.

Windows also added other 'low memory' technologies that are now running all the time, as they improve performance. From system RAM compression, to multi-read/write when handling 32bit code and data structures. (Example, handing a large chunk of data that exists in 32bit Integers, can be combined into single calls and stored in the available 64bit address spaces. This one reason why 32bit software runs faster on Windows 64bit, which was surprising to people that didn't understand this concept.


Real world metrics:
Even with the latest demanding game titles, there are ZERO titles that have shown any benchmark benefits of having more than 8GB of RAM. That is FAR from 32GB of RAM. So users with 16GB are good.

Tests in software like Photoshop or even most 3D design software exhibits ZERO performance difference between 8GB of RAM and 32GB of RAM.

The only 'differences' is when the user is dealing with content that is several GB in side, and ONLY if the software is processing that data faster than the I/O stream can provide. Which MOST software cannot handle the data fast enough, and reading from an average SSD instead of holding it in RAM offers virtually no performance difference.

Even something like Adobe Premiere or other Video editing software or 3D rendering software that are handling 100s of GB of data cannot process data any faster if it all loaded in RAM or if it is being pulled from the storage media. (This is in professional workflows and something even the average YouTube video editor will never encounter.)


YES, more RAM is always better. However, if someone is looking at a device with a locked amount of RAM, like 8GB or 16GB in a non-upgradable notebook, the RAM difference should almost NEVER be the reason to not buy the device. (Even 4GB, isn't a major performance difference on Windows, even though it does have a measurable difference in gaming.)

Finally, I know it seems counter intuitive that a full Workstation class OS like Windows doesn't need as much RAM as a a mobile OS like Android. If our phones need 8GB of RAM or more, then we assume are desktop/laptop must need more, and it doesn't.

Also when comparing using Photoshop on OSX to using Photoshop on Windows, an 8GB Windows system will be as fast as a 16GB OS X system. The RAM needs in 2019 are different, and OS X needs at least 1.5x the RAM to not run into being RAM starved.