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.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.
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.
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.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.
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 ???? ,
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.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 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 shut your browser and stop being a cabbage.
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.
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.
Dude stop using XP. that is really not good!!!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
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.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.
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.