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

Steve

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Intel Skylake processors will be about 18 months old when they are replaced early next year with 'Kaby Lake' parts. AMD is also expected to finally unleash their Zen CPU, and with that we expect many of you will be looking into these new platforms for possible upgrades.

Although memory prices remain competitive (read: cheap), there's been a slight surge in pricing during the past few months. For the most part DDR4 memory is now cheaper than older DDR3, with 8GB DDR3-2400 kits starting at just $60 -- less than many of you would spend on a lump of aluminum for your CPU -- you probably won't think twice about spending $110 to secure a 16GB kit. Faster 3000MHz DDR4 memory starts at ~$55 for 8GB and $95 if you want 16GB.

But regardless if you opt for Kaby Lake or Zen, or go for last season's range of processors, you'll likely be asking yourself: "Should I get 8GB or 16GB of RAM?"

Read the complete article.

 
I agree mostly with this article however, I have come across some issues with just 8GB of RAM and your a bit of a power user (loads of tabs open, video editing software and a couple of other bits and bobs).

I used to have 8GB of RAM and that was plenty really until I started playing Battlefield 4, if I had a fair amount open and played Battlefield 4 at the same time, I would get random micro stuttering (specially with 64 player maps). I monitored my PC's performance and found that basically all 8GB was in use and it was Paging quite a lot to my SSD, once I upgraded to 16GB of RAM, this has never occurred since.

I'm guessing the way the Frostbite engine works must store quite a few assets into RAM and when it was Paging causing the engine to have to go to the SSD for it's files was causing a considerable delay.
 
If you have insane amounts of ram (say 32+), you can always make a partition small enough that resides in the RAM. It will be like the fastest SSD ever made, so there's that :D.
 
I agree mostly with this article however, I have come across some issues with just 8GB of RAM and your a bit of a power user (loads of tabs open, video editing software and a couple of other bits and bobs).

I used to have 8GB of RAM and that was plenty really until I started playing Battlefield 4, if I had a fair amount open and played Battlefield 4 at the same time, I would get random micro stuttering (specially with 64 player maps). I monitored my PC's performance and found that basically all 8GB was in use and it was Paging quite a lot to my SSD, once I upgraded to 16GB of RAM, this has never occurred since.

I'm guessing the way the Frostbite engine works must store quite a few assets into RAM and when it was Paging causing the engine to have to go to the SSD for it's files was causing a considerable delay.
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.
 
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.
 
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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'.
 
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.
 
I used to be 8GB, but I had to go to 16GB since windows kept complaining that I was low on memory. I probably need to do some cleaning up of startup stuff and what not, but I am also a have multi-tasker.
 
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.

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.
I was interested in why you have so many apps running all at the same time. I guess we all use our machines differently.
 
Please stop doing RAM tests on 32-bit games; the old Virtual Address Space limit of 2GB remains in effect, hence why every title is using the same amount of RAM. In short, the games are using all they can at any one time due to an architectural limit. Even if the titles are compiled with LAA set, they're still limited to just 4GB.

If you want to test RAM's effect on games, you have to test 64-bit titles. It's as simple as that.

Also FYI: 2^31 = 2147483648, or 2GB, not 2.2GB like the article is claiming.
 
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.
 
I use 8GB of memory in my computers, they're admittedly older systems, but it works enough for me. However, one situation I can think of where additional memory would be helpful is if you are still using a pagefile (which I still do). As SSDs have practically become the norm, a pagefile is the last thing I'd want to have being constantly modified on my SSD if I can help it (though admittedly a lot faster in recalling large amounts of page than a traditionally HDD). I currently mitigate this by storing my pagefile on a secondary hard drive, but my next build will most likely be pure SSD so I'll be putting a minimum of 16GB of memory in my system in order to bypass the need for a pagefile. Of course this is in the practice of trying to make everything as fast as possible, not necessarily being efficient. =p

Of course I'm probably babying my SSD and shouldn't worry about it but I am a silly person, plus memory is pretty cheap.
 
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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.
 
If there is a SSD inside your PC, you should disable page file, so you need 12 GB of RAM. Because today the RAM price is very low, 16 GB is the best pick. Dual channel is not important, but disabling the page file translates into a longer life for the SSD and a boost in performance.
 
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.

I would contact your desktop support team at work (if you have one) and ask them to give you more RAM. At my work, we use 64-bit images so everyone has at least 4 GB of RAM.
 
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 ???? ,
 
The idea of extra memory was more relevant in the old times, when you had slow hard-drives for paging of used memory and swapping processes in and out of memory. With todays rapid memory-like SSD 's those transfers of memory is hardly noticeable any more.

A more realistic test would completely turn off all usage of all pagefiles. I don't need the ability to save crash dumps so I have zero pagefile in my 16GB system. As a small bonus I get less writes to my SSD.
 
8Gb is fine if you're not a power user who does serious gaming and has to have a ton of apps open to save a few milliseconds. 16GB is better if you want to shut off the page file.
 
I have disabled the page file on my 8GB system with an SSD and haven't noticed any problems. However, when gaming I tend to have very little else open besides a browser.
I would also suggest that anyone using a graphics card with low VRAM should consider getting more system RAM to compensate. I've seen older graphics cards regularly using a further 3GB from the system RAM.
 
My x58 build is currently sitting on 12GB of ram. And when I went up from 6 to 12GB in 2011 it was a good idea. I do alot of things on my machine from VM's to video editing etc.

For my next build I think I will go with 16GB of ram like the x58 halfway through it life cycle probably go up to 32GB's.

I no longer upgrade machines are frequently as I use to.

My x58 build is from 2009 and still going strong will be 6 years this oct. My next upgrade which will most likely be Skylake E will have to last me just as long or longer.
 
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