8gb or 16gb of ram for new gaming pc?

[Deepsidedj]

If you buy those new type of ram that work together, combined, then yes, 16gb all the way. Actually wait, that must be in the motherboard. The ram slots are blue, and the rams will work together for faster performance.

[Deleted]

If you buy those new type of ram that work together, combined, then yes, 16gb all the way. Actually wait, that must be in the motherboard. The ram slots are blue, and the rams will work together for faster performance.

What????

So long as its the same memory type and speed itll work together, if you get sticks with varying speeds RAM will work at the slowest cards speed.

If the rest of your rig is awesome then tbh you may be better off getting 1866mhz ram instead (make sure CL timings are the same or its not really an upgrade) however if you will do video editing or large amounts of rendering then it would be beneficial to get 16gb of 1600mhz.

If you will not be doing this then it would probably be best to get a better GPU/SSD.

[Deleted]

Don't waste your money. 8GB is far more than enough. I have 8 and very rarely use more than 4 of it.

People who buy 16GB ram either know they need it or just want to say that they have it without knowing why they need it. Don't be the latter, it's lame.

[Altariaz]

If you buy those new type of ram that work together, combined, then yes, 16gb all the way. Actually wait, that must be in the motherboard. The ram slots are blue, and the rams will work together for faster performance.

What are you on about?

To the op's question, you will be fine for 8gb of RAM.

[Coldkil]

12gb and go triple channel.

[Trogon]

Quite funny when people say 8 GB is enough and I got a friend with 96 GB of RAM (I'm not saying that 8 GB ISN'T enough.)

[Cyanotical]

12gb and go triple channel.

tri channel is out of date

[Skorpionss]

This makes me laugh as i remember once hearing a home computer will never need more then 512mb of ram, and this wasn't that long back..

well considering that home computer mostly means facebook/youtube/movies/music they are pretty right... none of that needs more then 512mb of ram if u run windows xp(ofc it'll be slow as hell but it'll run)

[Oerba Yun Fang]

I went with 16GB because why the hell not? It's super inexpensive these days.

[Deleted]

This makes me laugh as i remember once hearing a home computer will never need more then 512mb of ram, and this wasn't that long back..

I remeber it being 640kb
Times change.

OP. 8GB at the moment is fine for gaming. 16GB is over kill for gaming. However. Windows Loves Ram. if you can give it more for a cheap price. then do it.

[vesseblah]

However. Windows Loves Ram. if you can give it more for a cheap price. then do it.

Overkill is overkill. I got 16GB for the sole reason that I didn't want to ever pull out the big CPU heatsink off from the board if I want more RAM, so I got 4x4GB kit instead of 2x4GB kit.

Right now I'm sitting on relatively empty desktop of Win7Pro 64bit version with only Firefox (4 tabs including this one), uTorrent and Google Talk clients open. Memory usage is 2GB for disc cache, 0.3GB for OS+programs.

[Deleted]

For the love of Batman, please don't listen to those wanna-be modeling junkies. If you are purely into gaming, you won't need anything more than 8gb ram and an Intel i5 CPU. There's plenty of blog posts on the Internet that are strictly against future proofing - it's a waste of money. If you really need an upgrade in about 2 years, just add another gpu and two additional RAM sticks.

My setup:

i5 2500k with 3.8ghz
hd6950 (powercolor with 2gb, will add another one in about two years)
2x4gb g.skill ripjaws
a mainboard and a ssd

I run 2 27" LED screens, play every single new title with full graphics while watching a movie or whatever on the 2nd screen.

[Mukki]

This is my sentiment as well. Then people can reply and say "Teehee you wasted money on something you never use!"

Getting an overpowered computer is also a matter of foresight. My previous build lasted me from 2005 - 2012 and was able to run Skyrim/Diablo 3/whatever towards the end of its lifecycle.


Of course there's nothing wrong with moderation either. Also keep in mind that you couldn't do much in the way of upgrades for Socket 939 boards once you had an FX-60 (once they were cheap).

[WarJames]

if you want to free up page file from SSD then get 16gb

8gb is NOT enough

---------- Post added 2012-06-21 at 06:22 PM ----------

You sure you aren't confusing between available and free RAM? Windows uses few gigs for disc caching if it's available and makes it not free, but this can be dropped in an instant to give more free & available RAM if needed.

Few months ago I was idling in orgrimmar in LFR queue on one monitor with the 64bit client and editing guild's first Madness of Deathwing heroic kill out of three source videos at 1080p on second monitor with few IM clients open on the background. Memory usage was about 6.5GB at that point.

So no, you really do not need more than 8GB even for extreme use cases or home video editing. Only if you do something silly like multiboxing or running several VM's. That doesn't mean you can't buy 16GB "just in case" because it's cheap, but it's probably not gonna be used either.

so what if I wanna run more than 2 MMO's... on 8gb I could not load the second MMO it would crash as out of memory (this is with testing and page file off) to desktop

I sometimes run 3 mmo's at once

yes need more than 8gb for that

[vesseblah]

so what if I wanna run more than 2 MMO's... on 8gb I could not load the second MMO it would crash as out of memory (this is with testing and page file off) to desktop

Sounds more like a bug than requirement. Turn pagefile back on, with low settings such as 512meg. Some misbehaving/buggy piece of shit programs requires pagefile to be present, even though the computer is not really out of memory. Look at what the game actually uses for RAM while it's running instead of what's left to get real numbers. WoW for example runs happily with about 900 meg of RAM per client.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

I've run WoW, D3, firefox with a dozen tabs and internet radio and a video stream buffering alongside a VoIP client and some other random programs and didn't even break 4GB RAM usage.

WoW uses about 1 to 1.2GB RAM when it is running. You could run 6 instances of WoW on 8GB RAM simultaneously and not run out of memory. "Could not request enough memory" errors are usually due to a buggered game file cache anyway.

[anabolicz]

16, why? why not?

[Palmatum]

Go for 16GB. Negligible difference in price and I build a PC to last.

[WarJames]

um... I dont play wow... sure you can have 10 wows open at once on 8gb LOL

im talking games that use around 4gb EACH Tera and SWTOR / GW2

[Deleted]

The big question right now is, do you multitask a lot or are you like the typical Windows user who keeps a handful of low-resource (IM, browser etc) applications running and then one big (game, photoshop or such) application at most?

Personally I have 12 GiB right now and I frequently find myself using 10+ but that's because I run lots* of applications at once on multiple virtual desktops.

* Currently running:

• Firefox (17 tabs)
• Photoshop (3 files open, all 16-bit in the 8-12 MP range)
• Eclipse
• iTerm (four windows, nine tabs in total)
• Mail.app
• uTorrent
• iTunes (~40 GB library)
• MplayerX (playing an episode of Futurama)
• Adium
• Aperture (~50 GB library)
• X11 + Wireshark