16 or 32 GB Ram

[pinky6225]

I'm thinking of upgrading my RAM as I currently have 8GB @ 1333 mhz and I've noticed it now goes up to 1866mhz before we start getting into overclocking stuff (don't intend to overclock) so switching to 16 GB @ 1866 should be a speed improvement.

 

From the internet it seems getting 2 x 8 GB is better than getting 4 x 4 GB which i what i was originally going to do and there seems no particular price difference between 2 x 8GB or 4 x 4 GB

 

So if i get 2 x 8GB i'm still going to have 2 spare slots, my motherboard says it supports up to 32 GB and i have windows 7 pro that allegedly supports up to 192 GB but i'm wondering if their would be a lot of difference between 16 GB and 32 GB since either is a shit load of ram.

 

Has anybody tried and noticed an improvement/difference? Or would it just be another cupful of water over the head of my PC that's already going to be drowning in RAM

 

RAM i was looking at getting is...

Corsair 16GB DDR3 1866MHz Vengeance Kit - Intel Haswell

http://www.ebuyer.com/509507-corsair-16gb-ddr3-1866mhz-vengeance-kit-intel-haswell-cmy16gx3m2a1866c9b

[Laura]

As far i know.

16Gb is more than enough for most current and upcoming games.

GPU's is where its at.

[Alva]

Just like when people started moving to 4 GB when 2GB was enough and 8 GB when 4 GB was enough and .....

Seriously though - you will not notice difference unless you do heavy application work.

 

Games are hardly even out of x32 bit yet for some reason (scardy cat developers) - but heck - if you're a nerd like me then RAM is rather cheap and numbers are important, so 32 GB for me when the motherboard can support it. (Just check if your OS can use it).

 

 

[Slammer64]

16 gig is only useful if you have programs that can take full use of it, look at Skyrim, the most it can use is 3.2 gig before it crashes out, that's right at the limit of Windows 32bit, you'd need a 64bit O/S with 64bit programs making use of any ram over ~3.2 gig approx.

[Vioxsis]

Are you using all 8 gig at any one time??  Do you do a lot/any video editing or graphical design?

 

I don't see how going up from 8 to 16 is going to speed you up that much if anything.

 

 

 

....Get 32 and use 24 as a ramdisk... wait make that 64 and use 56 as the ramdisk (games take up a lot of space now  )

[LordJerle]

General rule of thumb these days is 2 gigs per core to prevent bottlenecking, but the transfer rates are where it's at.  The higher the hertz, the better the transfer rate, but your processor has to be able to handle the transfer rate of the memory.  GPU's work under (roughly) the same idea as a processor and RAM combined into one setup to reduce rendering times and all that, but you still have to have the RAM and CPU capacity for it to work at full capacity, otherwise it's just a big bottleneck, and vice versa blah blah blah.  The whole "games don't use that much RAM, it's all up to the GPU" stuff is o.O wtf are people on?  You still have to have the RAM and processor time for background processes and side processes.  Say you're playing Skyrim and you've got your browser open to gamefaqs to alt tab to for quest guides.  You might not actually be in the browser while you're in game, but it's still stored in the RAM so you can switch into it.  If you plan on using a bunch of apps at once, 32 gigs is where you need to go, but if you're looking for speed over capacity, go for 16 gigs of the higher speed RAM.

[pinky6225]

Are you using all 8 gig at any one time??  Do you do a lot/any video editing or graphical design?

 

I don't see how going up from 8 to 16 is going to speed you up that much if anything.

 

 

 

....Get 32 and use 24 as a ramdisk... wait make that 64 and use 56 as the ramdisk (games take up a lot of space now  )

 

Well at the minute all i'm doing is browsing and playing a web game (settlers online) and i'm seeing...

 

 

Which doesn't sound that impressive if i was to decide to play a game so i've gone with the simple logic of higher numbers is better

 

As i've just done the motherboard and cpu and i did the gpu earlier in the year all that's really left is ram and secondary storage before eternal crusade gets released next year and by upgrading in stages before it becomes absolutely necessary i'm able to spread out the cost so money isn't that much of an issue but by the same token i don't want to spend money to no benefit (have lending to friends to fill that need in my life )

[LordJerle]

Browsers eat into memory a lot these days, especially if there's any flash involved.  

[Vykroft]

I have 8 GB and never use more than 6, and sometimes I load Blender, Photoshop, Windows Media and CryEngine at the same time while I take some time to see some video tutorials on youtube.

Man, for video games, at this time, there is no Pc game that use more than 8gb, not even closer...

[Captain Cobra]

You'll probably build a new computer by the time you'll be needing more than 16 gigs.

[agent57]

WRT gaming in general, memory requirements are primarily decided by what the publishers think will lead to the highest return on investment.

 

Up until last year, I would have said that 8GB was enough, most titles were 32 bit ( due to memory limitations on x360/ps3), meaning that they would at most use 4GB, leaving a 4gb overhead for the OS and background functions (assuming a 64 bit os).  However with the advent of the PS4/Xbone, publishers/developers going forward will be designing their titles with an 8GB memory model in mind, which requires 64 bit binaries.  This being the case I would not be surprised to see most major titles of 2015 onwards needing 8GB minimum ( 16 recommended ) and a 64 bit OS.

[LordJerle]

I remember when 4 megs was plenty to run anything...  Then Windows 95 came along :-P

[Bromm83]

For me 16GB has worked out fine, never used over 8-10 of them at a time. 

So I would buy 16GB now, and if you come to a point where you want to upgrade to 32, just buy two new 8GB..

Most likely you will have upgraded much more on your computer and even faster RAM will be on the market before you have any need of anythign over 16GB

[hentaijin]

There are some games that can really use up massive amounts of memory, like Battlefield 4 and the upcoming BF Hardline. I remember the hardline beta was only for 64-bit

Mostly new big blockbuster games that will eat memory.

[EternalDamned]

Simply put, unless you can get the 32 for very nearly the same price as 16...it's probably not worth it. For the simple reason, that while eventually you may want/need more ram. By then the blazing fast ram of today will be the outdated ram people are giving or throwing away then. It wasn't all that long ago that 1366 was considered blazing fast top of the line ram with 8Gb max on 99% of motherboards. A very few could hold 16Gb even though nothing would actually use it. So I would honestly advise 16Gb for now, place the cash saved aside for when you will want to start replacing MB/Ram/Processor again in 2 years as what you have now becomes dated.

[Content Consumer]

I remember when 4 megs was plenty to run anything...  Then Windows 95 came along :-P

I remember spending hours optimizing everything so I could get the most out of my games. That 640k memory barrier was awful.

Then we got a computer with a 386 processor and a whole megabyte of RAM and I was in heaven... for about five minutes... until I realized that everything still locked at that damnable 640k barrier!

 

Someone, somewhere in the world RIGHT NOW is sitting down developing a new architecture and saying to themselves "nobody will ever need more than one terabyte of RAM, so we'll set the limit there" and in twenty ten years from now I will be cursing that person.

 

Ten years. That's a laugh. Just watch. It's gonna happen next frigging month.

[Content Consumer]

16 gig is only useful if you have programs that can take full use of it, look at Skyrim, the most it can use is 3.2 gig before it crashes out, that's right at the limit of Windows 32bit, you'd need a 64bit O/S with 64bit programs making use of any ram over ~3.2 gig approx.

 

 

Skyrim's recommended system requirements have always included a 4-core processor and 4GB RAM.

Skyrim originally shipped without the ability to recognize multiple cores and was not "large address" aware (fixed in a quick patch).

 

I have 16GB RAM and I did it because I really wanted to "future-proof" my system... this computer should still give me many years of joyful service before I even consider upgrading anything.

Except the video card, I guess.

[pinky6225]

 

I remember when 4 megs was plenty to run anything...  Then Windows 95 came along :-P

I remember spending hours optimizing everything so I could get the most out of my games. That 640k memory barrier was awful.

Then we got a computer with a 386 processor and a whole megabyte of RAM and I was in heaven... for about five minutes... until I realized that everything still locked at that damnable 640k barrier!

 

Someone, somewhere in the world RIGHT NOW is sitting down developing a new architecture and saying to themselves "nobody will ever need more than one terabyte of RAM, so we'll set the limit there" and in twenty ten years from now I will be cursing that person.

 

Ten years. That's a laugh. Just watch. It's gonna happen next frigging month.

 

 

Ahhhh the days of constantly using edit (or copycon before the days of edit) to alter autoexec.bat to load stuff into EMS/HMS to get the base memory for a game to run

 

 

[bjornk]

If I were you, I'd buy 2 x 8 GB and I would also remove the thought of "adding more later" out of my mind.

 

I highly doubt that we'll see any 64-bit game or a Microsoft OS that will require more than 8 GB of system memory as minimum in the foreseeable future.

 

 

[Spartan 363]

I agree with those that recommend 16GB of RAM because it will be a few more years before 16GB would be considered the recommended amount for games until the next gen of consoles catch up to use that amount of RAM. Heck it wasn't until the latest consoles launched that 4GB of RAM was the standard for years since the 8800GTX days. From the trend set since the 360/PS3 era, PC games have been held back because of the inferior amount of RAM both cosoles at the time used until the launch of the latest consoles can now allow PC games to utilize 8GB so that they maintain parity with the slower consoles that my 5 year old i7 920/X58/12GB RAM with GTX 680 SLI that still trounce the latest consoles, lol. I'm already purchasing the parts to my next build which will be an i7 5930k/x99/DDR4/Tri-SLI GTX 980's since I now own an LG 55UB8500 55 inch 4K w/HDMI 2.0 that allows me to connect my HDMI cable to the 980's since those cards have HDMI 2.0 too and allow 60 FPS gaming. I have already purchased an EVGA X99 Classified motherboard and the i7 5930k. I still need to buy the 16GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 3000 kit that I want. I should see a large improvement with my SLI 680s since my aging X58 mobo is PCI-E 2.0 while my 680s are PCI-E 3.0 and are both 4GB cards too. Even my current SSDs would get a boost since they are SATA 3.0 vs my current x58 mobo being SATA 2.0

[pinky6225]

I was looking at the new shadow of mordor http://store.steampowered.com/app/311670/

 

Recommended:

• OS: 64-bit: Win 7, Win 8
• Processor: Intel Core i7-3770, 3.4 GHz | AMD FX-8350, 4.0 GHz
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 | AMD Radeon HD 7950
• DirectX: Version 11

so it seems stuff wanting 8 GB is already here.

 

Did decide to follow the advise above and get 16 GB for the reasons that EternalDamned said, if i  got 32 now by the time 32 was useful the clock speeds would increase or something

[Vortec]

 Here is a good article about 16gb of Ram along with SSD storage.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-ram-endurance,3475.html

[pinky6225]

 Here is a good article about 16gb of Ram along with SSD storage.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-ram-endurance,3475.html

 

Good news for when i get Crucial M550 512GB 2.5inch SATAIII SSD http://www.ebuyer.com/629703-crucial-m550-512gb-2-5inch-sataiii-ssd-ct512m550ssd1 next month then

 

[Professorg]

As someone with an A+ Certificate, I would go with upgrading your CPU, in Skyrim with is heavly modded here are some reccomended stats:

Ram: 6GB

CPU: Any intel i7 should handle it, I personally stuck with my i5, it chops sometimes however it doesn't bother me all too much

GPU: 4GB, 2GB will work but you might have to sacrafice some things

Motherboard bus speed: 200Mhz [costly but my god is it worth it]

Hard Drive: SSD [solid State Drive] of at least 200GB [but 500GB is well worth it]

 

Anyway I hope this helps, I'm not really going to go too in depth as to my choices

[Rayblue]

16gb is as far as I know to be just enough for most, but 32gb is best used when you're running a server, or lots of programs loaded at the same time, or several virtual machines, or serious desktop publishing, or using the spare ram as a fast RAM disk for caching.