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

I used to have 8gb. I now have 24gb.

The simple reason to add more was that 8 was just not enough when my wife was also using the computer throught the day (ie both logged in).

All your tests assume a single user at any given time and completely logging off.
 
Power users will definitely benefit since it allows them to run intensive programs + a lot of browser windows. This is a great article though for the average user, like you said.
Yeah the only reason I went from 8gb to 16gb was to stop the "DISABLE AERO TO SAVE ON MEMORY!!!!" message that would pop up whenever I'd play certain games because I'd have a mess of Firefox tabs open all the time along with Steam, the Battle.net launcher and whatever other dumb things run in the background nowadays.
 
Have had 8GB since 2008 and this was not enough since ~2010 till today... if you play blizzard games like WoW (with 100 addons) or HotS and have multiple monitors and keep browser open with 40+ tabs or occasionally use VM-s for running various test stuff. So when someone asked me today how much RAM is needed I would say 16GB is bare minimum... look for more if your budget allows. When I myself would build a PC today... (actually I am building one right now, just parts are in short supply in this region for ITX Z170 boards and Nano lets us wait for itself etc ... and 16GB modules are nowhere to be found in shops) I am going to put 32GB into it, because hopefully this PC will last for next 5+ years.

...You're serious? Wow is what you use in reference? Wow has been supporting potato pcs since 2005. 16gb of RAM for Wow. Kek. "omg I have over 9000 addons and have to render five 3TB videos while I play" . I have 16GB ram, a I7 4790k and a gtx 980 ti. When I play a game..I shut everything else down. Because I'm not a retard. Just...why. Just shut your browser and stop being a cabbage.
 
But why would you play games with a million background services running? Do you really need all of them running?
I also have 16 GB of RAM which is way overkill for me but the only reason I have it is because I bought my Patriot Intel Extreme Masters memory on a great special which was only about 7 quid more than the 8 GB kit.
That said I've never seen my memory usage go much above 5 GB in any game I play.
Because Exporting some of the videos I have take hours, I prefer to have all my usual websites open as it makes it quicker to find and do things, TeamSpeak, Origin, Steam, uPlay and Battle.net are always open and auto updating. iTunes for Music. I usually have a couple of RDP windows open for work and/or home server access. Watchguard System Manager to check my Firewall is all ok, vSphere client to check my server performance and what it's been up to. Then there's the usual background stuff, Asus Ai Suite, Corsair Link, Razer Synapse, Creative Sound Card settings and GeForce Experience.

That's just my usual stuff, That wasn't really the point of my original post though, the point was that my frame rate was still high playing Battlefield 4 but I got quite bad micro-stutter at times and that was caused by not having enough RAM available, so anyone who likes to run and do lots of things at once might want to consider the 16GB anyway as modern games chew up RAM a lot more than they used.

to be honest you have so many crap useless programs in the background that's why you need so much RAM an average or a power user doesn't need a 16gb kit when he can just organize his programs and shut the chrome off it takes like a few seconds to reload all the pages you left open what's really the point of leaving 60+ tabs open ???? ,


A tad judgmental there, I believe that if a user is comfortable with X number of apps open then so be it that is their personal preference . I myself put 24 Gig of ram in my desktop so I can run a whole virtualised windows domain... You can ask why do I need to do that well lets say I want to test out setting up an SQL cluster with two SQL servers at 4 Gig each and a domain controller at 4 gig right there is 12 Gig. My default config is using 5 Gig of ram so right there I am over 16 Gig. One thing to note if you use Samsung's Rapid Drive that's another 2 Gig used. Memory is so cheap why worry about it.
 
A tad judgmental there, I believe that if a user is comfortable with X number of apps open then so be it that is their personal preference . I myself put 24 Gig of ram in my desktop so I can run a whole virtualised windows domain... You can ask why do I need to do that well lets say I want to test out setting up an SQL cluster with two SQL servers at 4 Gig each and a domain controller at 4 gig right there is 12 Gig. My default config is using 5 Gig of ram so right there I am over 16 Gig. One thing to note if you use Samsung's Rapid Drive that's another 2 Gig used. Memory is so cheap why worry about it.
I wasn't being judgmental, I was curious to know why a lot of people always have so many apps running in the background. I mean a person can only fully concentrate on one thing at a time.
You may have noticed I later stated each to their own, we all use our machines differently.
 
Thanks for the good write up. I run 16gb of ram because I use FL Studio with multiple plugins, effects and compression settings while doing live recording. Other than that I believe 8GB is the sweet spot for most situations.
 
Pagefile:

1) Set it to System Managed and it won't take up near as much space on your drives as Automatically Managed does which will be equal or greater than your total system memory. I have 8GB and 1280MB is currently allocated when set to System Managed. I tried the minimum +100MB (400MB) and I had problems so I went with System Managed (pagefile on SSD only) and my problems went away (crashes, memory errors, BSOD's).

2) Pagefile access is ~80% reads meaning having a pagefile will NOT degrade your SSD like you think it will.
 
I have 16GB ram, a I7 4790k and a gtx 980 ti. When I play a game..I shut everything else down.

because we live in the age of calculators... that can not multitask...

Because I'm not a retard.

... (I don't have to say even anything here... :) )

Just shut your browser and stop being a cabbage.

also because I am calculator and can not multitask while playing wow obviously. you know like... listening to youtube music while playing or reading wowhead for tips or play hearthstone in second monitor while waiting for something to happen in wow or whatever or play my AH ***** account in second wow client. Sorry, but my zx spectrum days are like.... in 25 years past (where the computer had 48kB RAM and it only could run one single program at the time).

And I also hate windows memory management and obviously have turned off page file (f*** that disk trashing that's so 90's and STILL built into the system... wtf MS?)... so when it runs out of memory something is going to crash... so it better don't.
 
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Could you guys do a more indepth test of the gaming portion ?

While avarage frames are okay, it would make more sense to atleast test minimum frames and/or frametimes aswell. I'm sure lack of ram would present itself more easily in such tests than pure avarage frames.

Just sayin'.

These were the most RAM hungry games we had installed, I tested over 20 games and most of them used less than 4GB’s. I also looked the minimum and frame time data, it was exactly the same as the averages.

As for the ram heavy games, would be much more interesting to see the load times and such, as alot of games load things into ram and hitting the swap/virtual memory might increase load times.
 
2x8GB kits are very inexpensive nowadays.

There's almost no reason to go with 8GB anymore unless you're either buying DDR4, or can barely even afford to upgrade in the first place.

If the latter, you might want to look into your financial situation instead.
 
Well no, you've got that all wrong.
1) Disabling the Page File means if your machine ever Blue Screens, you will never be able to find out what caused it as the PC won't do a memory dump.
2) It doesn't increase performance at all and can actually negatively affect performance as certain applications actively look for the Page File and when it's not there it screws them up.
3) Since Windows 8.1 on wards, you only need 2048-4096MB free for a Page file to do a decent memory dump, SSD's have got cheaper, this isn't a problem any more.
4) You are correct, the SSD may last longer, but, Most of us here will probably be 20 years+ older if we tried to use the SSD as much as possible, lets face it, pretty much all of us would have replaced our SSD's by then, hell I wonder if SATA will still be around in 20 years.

Admin: Apologies for the double post, I'm at a hotel and the WiFi here is absolutely awful.


1. My machine never blue screens
2. I don't have any app looking for page file
3. You're right
4. Yes, but the cost of more RAM is not an issue.
 
"Once you have 'enough' memory for all your applications to run, having more memory won't increase performance any further."

I'm sorry but this is just incorrect. You've completely ignored file caching where the kernel will keep copies of recently accessed files in memory. Over the course of a few hours an average system will be caching several GB of files and it's a massive boost to performance.

The best part is that it's completely transparent and is managed by the kernel. Every OS has been doing this for decades so it's very strange that you don't know about it.
 
With having 16GB of ram you can turn off virtual memory I don't think you would gain any performance by doing this but if you are running a SSD then you would save wear and tear on this drive.
 
Considering my then windows 7 was much snappier after going from 8 to 16gb... I would not have less than 16. However, I am now running out of ram because of my 3d rendering. I need to upgrade to 32gb. Windows
 
Spot on the money. 32bit users who add large amounts of RAM usually discover this or complain when they see <3gb in actual use.

Hopefully, all the advocates of large RAM knew that 64bit systems were required.

Actually I ran for years with 6GB on my previous Win XP(32) system and it made a huge difference from previous 2 and 4GB.

The trick was simply to put everything above 3-4GB into a RAMdisk with the Gavotte RAMdisk software(the only I found to work perfectly for doing this), then I put a big chunk of a preset swapfile on that, and suddenly XP had fullsize "normal" RAM, and a few GB extra of superspeed swapfile.

With some tweaking, while having a SSD or more useful RAM total makes a bigger difference, the difference to having only the previous 2 or 4GB was BIG. And the change going from that layered approach to having a SSD and 32GB RAM on 64 bit W7 that I have now, is definitely much smaller than the difference was from not using the RAMdisk trick.

Even now, I am considering finding a 2*2GB DDR2 set to replace the 2*1GB that was my original RAM, because I might still want to use my older computer, with how much incompatibilities I keep finding W7 to have with my older games.
Dude stop using XP. that is really not good!!!
 
Right, it was a trick and it needed the Gavotte RAMdisk to make it work. From the view point of the Win/32 system, memory was still limited to 2^32-1

The other RAMdisks I tried didn´t work perfectly so apparently yes. What sucks is that Gavotte worked fine in W7 originally, but not after SP1 adding a nonvisible security "feature" blocking the driver it uses.

And yes direct memory is the same, but Windows commit limit memory increases quite nicely without having to deal with the slowness of a swapfile on a HDD. Considering how much extra performance I got from the change, you can drop your sarcasm where it belongs, with the garbage.

4.5GB limit instead of 3GB, and browser and app caches moved to the RAMdisk on a system that was rebooted MAYBE once a month at most, the speedboost was massive. And considering how many people just grunted along about how "oh dear, using RAMdisks are just stoopid", it seems it was a very amazing "trick" for someone to think logically about it.
 
For the difference in costs, 16GB is the way to go. Why bother to install 8GB and later to realize another 8GB is needed and have to go out to find matching ram? I have been using 16GB as standard amount of ram on most of the systems for years and will be using a new system with 32GB ram. It's the right move.
 
The more I use W7, the more I wish I COULD have stuck with W-XP. With W10 just going further down the stupid path Vista started, I´ll probably have to go Linux next time I get a new system.
Sorry to hear that mate. I personally loved Vista. It was the only OS that never got frozen or BSOD. I know everyone is saying how bad it was though it was my most stable windows experience ever. I have upgraded to win 10 and love it. I don't know what your issue is.
I used Ubuntu for years and it was the biggest mistake of my life however I am always tempted to try again but it is just going to be a headache.
I guess we are no the same. :)
 
Its look like DDR3 is meet his destiny in 8Gigs. when we use 16Gigs DDR3 the ram timing is getting slower and the potential is become wasted. I have 8gigs single channel and the difference with dual channel barely noticable. maybe 16 Gigs performance will be shown by DDR4.
 
So much for "real world." The only graphics card used in the tests is a GeForce GTX 980, which is a $500 + card.

Many people, especially budget gamers, will be weighing getting a GTX 960 (about $200), or even a GTX 970 (a $300+ card) versus increased memory. The real question for these people is whether an upgrade from 4GB to 8GB or even 16GB of memory makes any sense, as opposed to doling out an extra $200 to $300 on a higher level video card.

I have to agree,

I just finished a Skylake build. i5-6600k 16GB DDR4 and a GTX 750ti because that's what I had on hand. 16GB was added only because I planned on running unRaid as the main OS with windows 10 in VM. I don't game that much, but the GTX 750ti is more than enough for decent 1080p gaming. unfortunateIy the i5 can't handle what I need it too. So I will be giving this build to a family member and building an X99 5820k system instead with at least 32GB of ram (mainly because of unRaid)
 
"Keep in mind there is little point in "future-proofing" your system with extra memory now as adding more down the track is always a more economical option"

I would disagree for one reason, I tried this and the RAM I had purchased, with intentions to buy more of it later down the road, became discontinued before I could buy a second kit. And because things need to match I just couldn't buy something that would be "close enough" so I had to buy two new kits instead of 1 making it not a very cost effective choice at all. But there is three explanations for this, X58 triple channel kits started to dry up, and the first kit I purchased before the RAM price hike of early 2009, after prices stabilized a lot of the kits had been replaced with newer revisions requiring less voltage which I didn't want to mix and match. Lastly, it was an OCZ kit, OCZ stopped making RAM in 2011, who would have predicted that back in 2008.
 
So this article has taught us what we've know for several decades: more RAM is great if you are doing a ton of stuff or working with massive files, but is otherwise ineffective. I run 16GB on the two desktop systems I use every day - one is for future-proofing (and because I can pretty easily use 6-8GB of RAM, personally) and the other is because that system cost me around $3,000, so the difference between 8 and 16GB of RAM was negligible.
 
For me memory is mostly about doing multiple things at a time. Watching video's online, while playing games and having lots of other programs open (so long it doesn't slow down my game). Shouldn't memory make a difference for that?
 
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