8GB or 12GB?

[nismo91]

i recently built new rig to play some games. basically, this is going to be my primary PC. now i have 8GB DDR3-1333 (basic G.Skill RAM) running in dual channel mode, and so far it looks pretty nice. running Battlefield 3 campaign on ultra only shows 30% physical memory in task manager, so i thought 8GB was plenty enough.

Until a friend of mine decided to sell his excess RAM, which are 2x Kingston 2GB DDR3-1333 for 20 bucks. I am now considering whether or not to up my RAM to 12GB. what do you guys think? my rig is only based on i5 2500 (lowest score on WEI), i am not even sure if it can benefit from the extra RAM.

specs:
- Intel i5 2500
- 8GB DDR3-1333
- Gigabyte H67MA
- 1GB GTX560Ti
- 120GB OCZ Agility 3

 

[Mizzou]

Just save the money, you should be fine with 8GB.

 

[Jawshh]

i recently built new rig to play some games. basically, this is going to be my primary PC. now i have 8GB DDR3-1333 (basic G.Skill RAM) running in dual channel mode, and so far it looks pretty nice. running Battlefield 3 campaign on ultra only shows 30% physical memory in task manager, so i thought 8GB was plenty enough.

Until a friend of mine decided to sell his excess RAM, which are 2x Kingston 2GB DDR3-1333 for 20 bucks. I am now considering whether or not to up my RAM to 12GB. what do you guys think? my rig is only based on i5 2500 (lowest score on WEI), i am not even sure if it can benefit from the extra RAM.

specs:
- Intel i5 2500
- 8GB DDR3-1333
- Gigabyte H67MA
- 1GB GTX560Ti
- 120GB OCZ Agility 3

Filling up all of the DIMMS on your mobo will put unnecessary load on the CPU because most of the time you won't be using 'em, so, the CPU will probably spend most of its time caching stuff in memory for future use. In the long-run, it might actually slow down the system.

You're probably only seeing 30% of physical memory because unlike legacy versions of Windows, Windows 7 caches your recently run software in memory to speed up the system. However, it'll clear the cache should an application require the memory. So, instead of considering physical memory as physical memory, it should be considered as a cache just like Ln caches on your CPU.

Personally, I don't think that any games can use up more than 3GB of memory because most of the time they're x86 and they've got 1-4GB on the video card to eat up. But, I haven't played BF3 yet, so, can't tell for sure.

 

[nismo91]

thanks for the answer both of you... it looks like im staying with 8GB...