Right now i have 6 gigs of ram on my computer and over 10 gigs of page file ram. Do i need that? If i didnt use page file ram, would it make my computer faster or slower?

What OS are you using? Generally the OS allocates the pagefile. No matter how much RAM you have, a certain amount of pagefile is always necessary.

i am using windows 7 x64 ultimate edition. Intel i7 975 3.33 ghz

Have you ever hiberrnate your machine? Perhaps you did and the cache taken for the hibernation still remains on your hdd.
If you go to the Virtual Memory setting of your PC ( Control Panel > System Properties > Performance Options > Advance > Change Virtual Memory) did you leave with the default setting of 'Automatically manage paging file size for all drives'?

I started looking into that question a couple of years ago. if you research it, its impossible to find a definitive answer about turning off the pagefile. I have shut off the page file on all of my machines and have not encountered any problems at all. I had a moderate performance gain back in the days of DDR(1) but it has not seemed to make much of a difference post DDR2. as I said its one of those things that 50% of the experts say go ahead and shut it off because its an antiquated throwback to when 256mb was considered a lot of ram, and the other half say don't do it because your system needs it. it has been my experience that it will not make a difference with your system. and just for the record, I am not recommending that you shut the pagefile off.

My 1.5cents worth...

I think the answers to the "pagefile" question have been changing as computers evolve.. On the one hand computers these days offer much more memory and faster disks.. but, depending on how you use your computer/your apps, you may also end up running many apps that need much more memory. If you wanted to keep an eye on a metric for your machine, you could always keep any eye on the Physical Memory Usage on Performance tab in Task Manager.

Tho my personal view of it:
1. Disks are quite large these days. Allocating 10-12GB is still worth it and a small price to pay to be sure of performance
2. But i, for one, go one step further. I don't allow Windows to manage my pagefile, Rather i allocate the full amount i think would be needed and allocate it all upfront. Reason: A defraged pagefile will also give better performance. If windows manages it, it would increase in chunks allowing for fragments.

Tho... these days i understand Windows 7 defrags page files (where XP didn't) but still i've managed to allocat PgeFile on new installs and achieve 5GB+ in one contigous chunk! (so never need to worry about fragmentation unless i ever needed more memory)

In any case, is up to you..

On XP I always managed my own pagefile. Set the min and max value to 2 x RAM. On Win 7 however, I've let the OS handle it.