The amount of RAM needed is frequently debated on computer posts.
- How much ram do you have?
- What do you use your computer for?
- Is it sufficient?
How Much RAM Do You Have? (2022 Edition)
ihfree on 08/10/2022 - 09:49
Last edited 08/10/2022 - 14:22 by 1 other user
Last edited 08/10/2022 - 14:22 by 1 other user
Poll Options
- 92GB
- 84GB
- 718GB
- 228GB (Apple silicon)
- 61416GB
- 5216GB (Apple silicon)
- 61432GB
- 1932GB (Apple silicon)
- 12464GB
- 1264GB (Apple silicon)
Comments
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You're killing me here
a NAS?
You don’t deserve a PC.
I have 24 lollll
8… mb.
Just enough to run duke nukem 3d and I’m happy
Nice. Probably should have had 640K for the first option
Hopefully the OS knows how to access the extended memory.
There's no extended memory on a 640K system. Extended memory is above the first 1MB.
640K ought to be enough for anybody
How did you even manage to load OzBargain and post this comment if you only have 8mb of ram? 🙂
You have to pause your chiptunes obviously.
I hope you have enough bubble gum
I’m all out of gum
My two personal devices are a
- Ryzen 3600/3070 gaming PC with 32GB (poll entry)
- MacBook Air M1 with 8GB
PC is pretty much exclusively gaming, some photo editing, though there's the possibility of some light development.
MBA is personal use - generally web browing, Google docs, light photo editing.
In both cases, sufficient. Though, I am tempted by a 14" MBP with 16 or 32gb ram rather than using my desktop.
Please everyone note this is just a casual PC flex.
FYI i5 2500k and 8gb of Ram
Those 2500's are awesome! Not were, are! Mine has kept going for many years, love it :) (16gb).
My kids PC is still rocking the next gen up, the i5 3570. We may have to replace soon, but only because the mobo is starting to fail (after a decade). It still plays all the games at 1080p and 60 FPS.
@Fobsessive: Boot failure every time you turn it on - can't find the main boot drive.
But if you go into the BIOS menu and restart, the SATA controller warms up or something because then it boots fine.
Kids have just gotten used to doing it every time.
@GandalfTheCheap: Have you tried replacing the CMOS button battery on the motherboard? Bios could be losing the settings with a bad battery.
@GandalfTheCheap: Nice. My previous PC was a 3570K. I almost overclocked it before replacing it.
The upgrade was worth it for me:
- Much more consistent gaming experience
- Modern platform - USB 3.1, NVME
- Much quieter system - D15, quiet system fans, PSU that doesn't run the fan all the time
Ran one of these for like 10 years until the motherboard gave up last year. Ran solid @ 4.5ghz 💪
What do you classify as "light development" that needs 32gb of RAM?
Ryzen 5950x with NZXT Z53 (Cooler head with the Screen)
Crosshair Impact VIII DTX
Razer Tomahawk Mini ITX
EVGA 3090 FTW3
2 x Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2 TB
64GB (2 x 32GB) Trident Z DDR4 3600Mhz RGB
4 x Noctua A12 Black series (Case modded to support fans on bottom of outside and front, but between faceplate to make room for GPU)
3 x NZXT RGB Fans to go on Z53 radiator and case exhaustHaven't touched my PC since I upgraded my 1080 to a 3090… because around that time my steam got hacked, all my CS Knives, rare DotA items got traded away I didn't really feel like going back.
And my wife has now been using it exclusively for work.Edit: Spelling
Got 2 systems that I use regularly;
R9 5900X/RTX 3080 Desktop, with 16GB RAM used for games and internet stuffs. Very occasional photo editing.
2016 Dell XPS 6th Gen i7, 16GB RAM, used for travel and to watch videos in bed.I bought the RAM kit in my desktop in 2016 and haven't need to change it since. Which is good considering my CPU is air-cooled and the cooler blocks the use of 1 RAM slot, while also limiting the height of the RAM in a second slot to be no larger than the Corsair LPX stick I have in there.
32GB for VM's. Not really sufficient.
If it wasn't for the VM's, 16GB would be enough for now.
I've got my gaming pc w/16gb ddr4.
But I also have a VM box with 32gb.
I agree it's not really enough but at this stage i'm only runing a couple of VMS so it suits my needs.
If I was looking to run multiple VMS, i'd check to see if they're suitable/viable to be slapped into docker containers before upgrading the RAM in my VM box.But I am aware there are many occasions where heavy handed VMs are the only viable option etc.
VMs are so 2000's. Most interesting workloads these days can run in Docker or Podman containers with a much lower requirement than a full-fledged VM. Distrobox is an excellent tool for integrating containers into your workflow.
I have 40GB of RAM. Its more than adequate for the not very demanding things I want to do in the 4 computers and 2 phones I've got.
I have filled my computer with ewe's, so much more docile!
With other silicon I build retaining walls, they seem to last longer.24(8+16)
It's intel gen7 laptop, so no need for dual channel.
Use it for gaming(lost ark, lol, monster hunter, etc), youtube.
I think for the same usage, 16gb would be pretty enough. My system got faster after I added 16gb, but it's not occupying more than 12~13gb in general, even though I keep 20 chrome tabs opened.You might actually be running dual channel (for the first 8+8 gb)
Nope, it was single 8gb at first, then added 16gb ram.
I understand, you will be running dual channel for the 8gb portion that is duplicated across both channels (the first 16gb)
24 in the old system retired 2 weeks ago (4gb x 6) and now just running 16 (8gb x 2) but might bump it to 32 or more if there's a good deal at some point.
16GB for my gaming PC (Ryzen 5700X + RTX 2070). Perfectly fine amount, never use more than that
My laptop has 8GB soldered. Sometimes could use more but it’s manageable
32GB on my PC because Adobe. And 8GB on my M1 Mac because I'm shortsighted, though honestly 8GB on M1 feels like 16GB on Intel so it is almost enough.
32gb
7700k
How much ram do you have? 16gb
What do you use your computer for? general purpose
Is it sufficient? normally but I have waaay too many tabs open that the browser is using 5gb
.5 gig is insane… how many open tabs do you think u have~200?
well one 'instance' has 181, so yeah it's a lot. i open things on PC and phone thinking i'll read it later but doesn't happen
i have 55 instances open, some have 2 tabs, many have more
.
Damn boy add them tabs to read later
And i thought my 20 tabs were badwhat you need is a tab suspender add-on. this will suspend/unload the tabs when you're not viewing it after a certain amount of time, thus reducing RAM and CPU load.
Its interesting how there arent that many people or apps that need more than 16g of RAM… yet go to some PC forums and dudes have 128g…. compensating I think.
lots of people do that for the aesthetics, dont like seeing the two empty ram slots, i guess in their minds its better to own 4x ddr4/5 rather than spend that ram money on a two dim board like apex unifyx or dark & get better performance out of an oc
I've got 128GB for developing ML code to run on very large datasets.
For reference,128GB is often not enough.
You'd be surprised what some specialist applications can require, or game servers.
A lot of people on PC forums will be "power users" but yeah, some are also bell ends. No different to cars really, some people buy what they need for their purposes, others just compensate or want it because they can.
Hardly remarkable though.
I'm pretty certain if you ask how much horsepower do people have in their cars, it would be considerably higher in a car forum than here.
I have 128GB in my work PC. 4x 32GB DDR4 RDIMMs. It still has 4 slots free. RDIMMs are very cheap secondhand as are server grade workstations a few years old. My old workstation has 192GB with 6 slots free.
I wouldnt buy normal ram used. But RDIMMs self test and can report errors detected over time so you know its good or not.
Any IT students/enthusiasts running virtual labs etc will likely need >32GB of RAM. The footprint of VMs, esp in terms of RAM usage, has become quite gluttonous.
Then you have folks working with very large data-sets, or using the RAM as a "ramdisk" to speed up workflow. There are plenty of use-cases that require huge amounts of RAM.
Having said that, for normal usage anything more than 16 is a bit of an overkill. Infact 16 seems to be the sweet spot at present.
The reason for ram for the majority of cases would be for workloads that require it, or if one needs to run multiple virtual machines. Although one is capped from a CPU standpoint, getting each VM over a particular memory threshold can help prevent unnecessary OS related wear and tear on one's multi terabyte M.2 nvme drive which tends to cost a lot more than ram.
Apple does not make DRAM silicon.
More to denote unified memory rather than manufacturer.
Bro you can just download some more
24 to try to help opendronemap processing drone imagery. Have not noticed an issue on any other software with 8GB.
64GB on the laptops. 128GB on main workstation (plus 16GB on each GPU) - your poll needs more choices.
Software development & compositing/VFX.
Most of the time it's enough, but every now and then workloads on the 128GB system run out of RAM. 512GB would be better, but the performance improvement/$$$$, is hard to justify.
Can’t you go up to 256 gb instead of 512?
Going above 128gb would require a workstation MB and CPU, I'm guessing that's where the expense lies.
At the moment the 128GB is using ordinary DRAM in 4 out of the 8 slots. I could try to source another 4 modules that have the same specifications to go to 256GB, but it would be pretty challenging to find matching DRAM.
If I was going to make changes, I'd prefer to pull out the existing four modules and replace them with eight modules of ECC RAM, at which point I'd go straight to 512GB or more. Mobo supports up to 2048GB when running all 8 channels.
Main PC is running 64GB for dev and WoW.
Server in cupboard is running 768GBWho and what does it serve?
The Lord.
TEMPLE OS.
All computers summed? Around 70
32GB for VMs, gaming and web browsing. Sometimes run out when I have too many VMs open.
What's the use case for VM?
Virtualising workloads? This way you can have workstations, servers, network appliances, purpose specific appliances, emulators etc. Very useful for anyone doing any technical IT training/testing/development.
32GB, but my usage case, 16GB probably is enough for now. I was upgrading my PC and thought, might as well increase RAM.
8GB has been fine for me. General browsing, light video editing and gaming.
Same. 8gb on both desktop and laptop for work and most of the time I have Chrome open, occasionally querying some dbs or editing some photos etc and it seems plenty.
If I upgraded I'd definitely get more memory to future proof it but I'm surprised 8gb gets so few votes, guessing we have a lot of gamers here.
I've also got 8GB on all my machines including Laptops. Feels quick and snappy enough for me.
Although I'm wondering if I should get 16GB due to OZB peer pressure! haha
If you're not having issues, there is no point in upgrading.
True… runs Win11 perfectly too. End of the day we only use it for web browsing and MS Word/Excel.. which isn't resource intensive.
Next new machine I get, will definitely get 16GB just because..
8gb but my PC is 7 years old.
If i were to upgrade now i would get 16gb.64GB for photo editing.
16g running win 10. Sometimes uses more than 50% when running several browser tabs, Adobe reader and MS Word
16 for me. My gaming tastes are hardly hard on the machine and aside from that its just WP and coding.
$200 Lenovo chromebook with 4GB ram. I use it to watch youtube and visit OzBargain
32 GB on my main PC, my main Laptop and my shed PC.
One other laptop at 16 I think and the rest 8 or less I think or whatever they came with for tablets and the like.
64GB - enables me to also have VMs
64gb in old machine. 16gb in new one as I only game on it, 16gb more than adequate for gaming.
64GB.
People will say 16gb is "enough for gaming" until they've tried 32.
Ignore the stupid GPU bound benchmarks on YT. 32GB+ removes most stutters and definitely improved the 0.1 and 1% lows (i.e. the bits you ACTUALLY NOTICE).
You wont notice a 5fps higher AVG, but you will notice when the game draws on the extra ram for a millisecond or two instead of your page file, and thus not stuttering when you would have if you only had 16gb.
32gb Can be had very cheap these days. Not to mention, all the background crap that are must haves with gaming machines now - RGB /Fant control software for GPUs / Fans /Motherboards /AIOs, then the 6+ different launchers…..yes…you can "close background tasks"….but wouldnt rather have them all open and ready and updated, so you dont have to wait when you need them?
Sounds silly….but worth it.
i have tons of background apps and browser open with 30 tabs, even during AAA title gaming it barely touches 10GB of my 16GB build. the only reason why your 0.1 and 1% lows will improve is if your machine is disk swapping when out of mem… which is still very unlikely in today's latest games. what you might be feeling is placebo… i'm happy to be proven wrong, if you have any benchmarks to share.
comparison showing 16GB vs 32GB 0.1% and 1% lows are the same.
https://www.techspot.com/article/1770-how-much-ram-pc-gaming…….Youre aware I said in my post to ignore the GPU heavy benchmarks?
Then thats exactly what you linked me? All of the games are running 98% gpu….
Games not stuttering anymore is not a placebo.
Unfortunate how many people have been duped into thinking 16gb is enough. Try 32 for yourself and find out. It wont show up in benchmarks because they, by nature, and short and repeatable, and are meant for GPUs.
Almost all games I play (1440p, 120fps where applicable) saw a large change.
By your logic, the GPU bound graphs linked show 8GB as "good enough", so why not use 8?
Same reason I went to 32 over 16
Finally, as actual proper modern games come out (almost all new releases are still crippled by "cross gen" Xbox One / PS4 support) you will see more games benefitting more from Re-Bar.
- I have 64gb now purely because I got lucky with a cheap deal -
@Typical16-bitEnjoyer: How do I show you? This is over hours of gameplay.
Again, this wont show up in benchmarks, as benchmarks are supposed to avoid instances of this as benchmarks are designed to stress GPUs or CPUs in a repeatable way, removing random outliers.
32gb is cheap enough these days regardless. If you want to cripple your PC go ahead, I literally gain nothing from trying to educate people.
Don't forget all those years those clowns on YouTube saying the same thing about memory speed being worthless, now they've all realised it is critical.
@Ahbal: You're either running 10-15+gig of background tasks or it's simply placebo. There's no explanation why 32gb over 16gb would make any difference to modern titles, and as you admit - you cannot prove it.
@Typical16-bitEnjoyer: @Ahbal could be right if the 32GB is made up of 2 x 16GB DIMMs which are dual rank.
The doubling of the ranks means there is a doubling of the number of bank groups and banks. This will lower the average memory request completion time as there will be fewer delays from same bank group delays and having to wait for a new row to activate. That lowering of average latency will translate to better frame time consistency.
@AnotherHuman: Also, you could both test this with two sets of DIMMs, CapFrameX, and Intel Vtune profiler if you cared to..
@AnotherHuman: I don't think they'll understand that. They dont even understand windows cant use more ram if there is none available….. "I never see more than 10GB usage" no shit? Because you have 16???? Honestly not worth the bother, I see too many of this due to mainstream shit-tubers.
But yes, more 32gb kits are dual rank than the 16gb kits.
A DR "fast 16gb kit" is almost as expensive as a 32gb kit.
People will say 16gb is "enough for gaming" until they've tried 32.
I downgraded from 32GB to 16GB because I never used more than that. Didn’t impact gaming at all. However, I don’t have things like discord, Chrome, One drive, etc. running in the background so my RAM usage is very light.
Also I don’t think you understood what AnotherHuman is talking about, it’s not about the capacity but the latency which improves the 1 and 0.1% lows.
Furthermore, I have seen RAM filled with an 8GB laptop. Its obvious pauses as the disk swap takes place rather than degraded overall smoothness indicative of bad 1 and 0.1% lows. I think AnotherHuman nailed it, it’s the quality not quantity of RAM that makes the difference
Tried 32 and 64GB many times, makes absolutely no difference, far more benefit from spending a few extra dollars on faster 16gb RAM. most games don't even use 8GB, most modern games 10-12 at most. Game devs target the most common builds so people buy their games as 16GB or less is still by far the most dominate build. 16GB machines making up over 50% of Steam hardware survey.
I moved two pcs and one laptop to 32 GB. I haven't noticed any improvement tbh, but memory is/was so cheap.
4gb, however, my machine is due for retirement/replacement. 4gb chugs along for light web browsing, MS office suite and SC2.
8GB in my M1 MacBook
16GB in my Windows 11 PC
64gb on my home desktop, only because the same 32gb kit went on sale for 2 really good deals in a week.
64GB. I have some fairly resource intensive workloads so it was worth it for me. Even toyed with the idea of going 128GB, but decided 64 would be OK for now.
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16+4 = 20GB