How many gig of ram is too much?

[leafer]

I have 4 now and was wondering if four more would be beneficial at this point?

[MTFDarkEagle]

Nice timing ;) I got 3 extra gig's yesterday, and I got some improvement. If it's not beneficial now, it will be in the future.

[leafer]

I was just reading up on the i3 and its tremendous overclocking potential, so, I'm hit with a dilemma. Beef up the ram or get a good heatsink so I can o/c the i3 but I can't do both. I have been on a spending spree the last two months. lol

[bumfire]

Unless you use something like photochop or something else that REALLY eats up memory, then you are unlikely to need more than 4 gig, but to be safe 6 gig is more than ample for everything people are likely to do on their pc with the exception of hardcore chopping or encoding/decoding etc.

 

6 gig is the new 4 gig sweet spot.

 

Leafer, if you are gunna upgrade your ram, dont buy more than another 2 gig, as it is a waste as you probably wont see the benefit from more than that.

 

If what you do on your pc atm is fast enough for you and you are not having memory problems, then go for the heatsink.

 

Up until recently I ran win7 64 with 4 gig of ram, I never thought I needed more ram, although I upgraded to 12 gig and I dont notice a blind bit of difference.

Edited October 29, 2010 by bumfire

[Boberro]

I think 4GB is today minimum, 6 medium but I'd like to have 8 GB. Windows 1.5 GB, games up to 4 GB, various applications in background up to 2 GB... anyway you will never regret you have too much ram, you would regret if you had too little....

[HiJack]

This thread reminds me of Bill Gates comments from 1981 to what computers ever would need.

 

“Nobody will ever need anymore than 64k of memory”

 

:megalol:

[topdog]

640k :) (i.e. IBM DOS normal 512k barrier + himem extension)

 

Developers need a lot of RAM, processing heap/crash dumps are a bitch. For gaming and productivity, unless you do huge video processing and don't like disk paging, 4GB should be plentiful on a 64-bit OS.

 

More than 4GB likely won't even get used unless you're very fond of running multiple large apps at once, run servers, or have some other special and known need for the memory - at least for the foreseeable future, though when it comes to computers, future is a very relative term.

[leafer]

Looks like the CM Hyper 212 Plus is a little sink that could and cost less than one gig of RAM!!!! That means I can get this sink and another 2 gig as suggested by bumfire for the price of 4 gig.

 

If I understand correctly, to achieve highest speed/stability I'd need to get high-end rams is that right? The ones I have now are regular Kingston DDR3 so will they hinder my overlcocking venture? I'm not looking to beat anyone's score; I just want it to clock as high as a noob can get it to go to play DCS series.

[dave4002000]

Anything over 4Gb is useless unless you are running an i7. Right now, the i7 is the only chip that can handle tri-channel memory. Which means matched 2Gbx3 sticks. If you try to use that setup with any other chip, you will see a reduction in speed and timing.

 

For every other chip out there, the best setup for gaming performance is a matched set 2Gbx2 dual-channel.

 

Obviously, what i'm talking about here is for gaming purposes only. If you run engineering or A/V programs and you are constantly overrunning your page file, then more than 4Gb is going to help you.

 

Another side note: Don't mix and match ram in your system. Only use sticks that are exactly the same and from the same company. A set of matched sticks will always outperform a set of mis-matched sticks.