How Much RAM Should You Get? 4GB vs. 8GB vs. 16GB Tested

[Steve]

Digital painting in Photoshop with image dimensions of 5000+ pixels and a dozen or so layers eats RAM up pretty quick. 6GB on my x58 rig couldn't handle it. I recently plugged in 24GB and things are running much better.

Unfortunately large brush sizes can still lag a lot. Particularly when spacing is set to a very low value, or while using the mixer brush. Ram doesn't help here, and I don't know if a CPU or GPU upgrade would help much with this or not. Maybe nothing helps here. No tech sites offer any suggestions. Even Adobe themselves make no mention of how to speed up brushes. Their advice ends with "more RAM for bigger files, and a GPU only helps with a handful of filter effects".

Our Photoshop benchmarks would suggest it is CPU power, what CPU are you using?

 

[BParkov]

Our Photoshop benchmarks would suggest it is CPU power, what CPU are you using?

i7 930, still running at stock 2.8ghz. Maybe I'll try overclocking it and see if I can notice a difference.

 

[Steve]

i7 930, still running at stock 2.8ghz. Maybe I'll try overclocking it and see if I can notice a difference.

Yeah so a newer faster processor will give you a big boost in Photoshop based on my testing.

 

[Adored]

Steve, thanks for again proving that 8GB is enough for gamers.

One thing I want to ask though - how are you measuring RAM usage? Many people use the "Free" number in resource monitor but that's a false value, the most accurate way to get the system memory usage is to remove the "Available" in Resmon from the system total because effectively the real amount of "free" memory left is Free + Standby, not just Free.

 

[Steve]

Steve, thanks for again proving that 8GB is enough for gamers.

One thing I want to ask though - how are you measuring RAM usage? Many people use the "Free" number in resource monitor but that's a false value, the most accurate way to get the system memory usage is to remove the "Available" in Resmon from the system total because effectively the real amount of "free" memory left is Free + Standby, not just Free.

I used MSI Afterburner.

 

[NightAntilli]

I have 16GB because when I start up a game, I don't want to close everything else that's open in the background. I have multiple browser windows open with multiple tabs, and those are memory hungry.

 

[Steve]

I have 16GB because when I start up a game, I don't want to close everything else that's open in the background. I have multiple browser windows open with multiple tabs, and those are memory hungry.

You don't have to, Windows will manage that for you.

 

[NightAntilli]

You don't have to, Windows will manage that for you.

Which will increase loading times etc, since I only have an SSHD, no SSD.

 

[Steve]

Which will increase loading times etc, since I only have an SSHD, no SSD.

It might impact load times, it certainly don't have a significant impact and it won't degrade actually gameplay performance so it shouldn't be a huge issue.

 

[NightAntilli]

It might impact load times, it certainly don't have a significant impact and it won't degrade actually gameplay performance so it shouldn't be a huge issue.

Agreed. But try Alt-Tabbing xD

Not saying everyone should go 16GB. I went with it because I use more memory than most people

 

[MonsterZero]

Awesome review! I have 8GB of RAM in my personal PC and have never had an issue playing games, running several browser tabs, and streaming music all the same time. My wife has 4GB in her PC and has no issues what so ever on her daily routines. At work I have 2GB in my computer and there isn't a day that I don't want to toss it out the window.

Honestly 2GB in today's business applications is simply ridiculous, 4GB is inadequate as well. 64 bit office applications, chrome, IE, and various proprietary applications tear through such a minimal amount of RAM. I would be yelling at your IT guy for pinching pennies.

 

[MadhuGoel]

The modern OS like w10 itself gobbles 2 to 4 gb. Code on R or Python may not manage memory of large data matrices efficiently and climb 8+. 4gb is basic for w10. 8gb is recommended. 16 is the application comfort .
All your comments are focusing on games ... what happens if users code and handle data sets?

 

[xordid]

Thank you for doing these benchmarks! Very useful.

 

[Sir Alex Ice]

This article is quite irrelevant, as the games tested are quite unpopular. World of Tanks and League of Legends should be included in every performance test, due to their huge fan base. Also, most popular games on STEAM should be taken into consideration.

 

[niklabs]

Sorry OP but Chrome with 65 tabs loaded will consume over 4GB on me. Heavy sites with flash, images and stuff.

 

[gregzeng]

Running Windows-10 on a Dell XPS-15 with 16 GB of DDR3 memory. Often I backup on two of my three off-line storage drives, simultaneously. Each version of Fastcopy uses 5 GB of cache, so 10 of my 16 GB are used for backup & synchronizing in the background.
This has been the fastest way for backing, synchronizing or restoring that I have yet discovered. My off-line backups are on USB3 drives, that use freeware FastCopy v3.10.

 

[Misagt]

An interesting article. I personally am running with 12G in my system which I think is a happy medium, mostly for running multiple applications. As I tend to stream media, host gaming servers, and game all at the same time, along with media playing on my system and browsing the net. 8GB would simply impede my ability to do all I like on my system. As for a user who performs 1-2 tasks at a time on their system I do agree 8Gb would be sufficient.

 

[CortyDK]

I'll be building an i5 Skylake mITX build next month. Probably going with 16 Gigs of RAM just because the pricetag is only about $50 more. I never game (except for old DOS games in DOSBox which never use more than 16 Megabytes of RAM - those were the days) but will be using it for casual videorendering (small private clips), office work and a bit of still-photo editing. My only doubt is wether to use the integrated GPU or use a XFX Radeon R7-240 2GB I have lying around. Primary HDD will be a 240 GB SSD and a secondary 500 Gb ordinary 2,5" drive for storage.

 

[chris schneider]

I just picked up 32 gigs of 2400 mhz ddd4 g.skill ram for 120 bucks. who are these people complaining 4 gigs is $$$?

 

[Squid Surprise]

I just picked up 32 gigs of 2400 mhz ddd4 g.skill ram for 120 bucks. who are these people complaining 4 gigs is $$$?

They're people who were replying to this thread when it was current - which was 5 months ago!!

 

[Misagt]

Personally, I'm running 12GB. I found that 8 was a bit too little for what I use my machine for. But I run several applications at once and my wife likes to steam media from my computer as well.

 

[Kibaruk]

Necro much?

 

[alexnode]

In general you need 16gb or 32GB+ only if you are doing professional 3D work. Using a lot of particles, displacement mapping etc. Editing 4K videos , doing professional compositing for 1080p and upwards. And finally virtualisation. No, for casual use you don't need a lot of ram.
I run out of ram on a 16GB laptop while I was working in 3ds max (3miilion poly scene), having an HD premiere video project open and editing a big 4K photoshop file, plus dropbox and the rest. Even in our workstation dual xeon v3 machines we have 32GB of ram and never show any slowdown because of ram.
8GB is fine for most people 16gb you will forget about ram. I don't think you should consider 4 gb though. I don't think that current and next generation games will go over the 8GB barrier.

 

[alexnode]

Nice job .
what about ram frequency ? 1600 , 1800 , 2100 , 2400 ? any differences ?!

for games you will gain just a few frames.

 

[alexnode]

I just picked up 32 gigs of 2400 mhz ddd4 g.skill ram for 120 bucks. who are these people complaining 4 gigs is $$$?

You have to consider that 120$ is the monthly salary for many countries. For others this could be a third of the day rate.