16 GB RAM worth it?

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lolibusxd wrote:

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NCPereira wrote:

I would say that for a power user 8GB is not enough. I tend to do lots of stuff at the same time.

What do you mean with that?

I mean running multiple programs simultaneously.

More RAM is not just about being able to fit everything you want to run. More RAM also acts as a cache for your slow hard drive (since windows vista if I recall correctly, linux and OS X do this too).
You can see the amount you have cached in the task manager under performance. On windows 8 you will see it directly, on windows 7 you have to click another button in the task manager. On linux use the command "free -m".
This is part of the reason why some applications start much faster the second time. Like Path of Exile. (For some reason PoE is the most slow starting application I have on my system. Even windows starts up like 5x faster.)

Applications that use garbage collecting also benefit from having a lot of RAM to spare to automatically optimize things. This includes stuff like Java, .NET and web applications (javascript). This is why a java application might look like it uses half a gig of RAM in the task manager, even though it really makes "use" of much less.
I saw a study that showed that using dynamic memory in Java (new Foo() in a loop) was able to outperform C (malloc(sizeof struct Foo) in a loop) by about 8x, as long as you had more than 5x more memory available than the amount absolutely required.


I have 32 GiB myself (the maximum the chipset I have supports), however I also run multiple virtual machines. I bought it when RAM was much cheaper though, ram modules seem to have gone up in price a lot.

If these benefits are really worth the money I do not know :>.

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Peenk wrote:

8GB isn't even needed for games, 16GB is for video editing and such.

I guess you have never played beyond 1080P with ultra setting textures on any A+ title made after 2012.


I'm running 16GB Ram at the moment, with 1GB used as a cache for most frequently accessed Data from my Samsung 840 PRO ssd, and I have 5 HDDs on top of that. My machine is pretty much a media centre for my Smart TV and all other devices in the house, so the machine can be transcoding 1080p/60 content to multiple devices, and I don't want it thrashing.

I tend to have a lot open at once, and I regularly use 90%+ of my 8GB. Stream + 2 browsers + PoE that takes 2GB, might upgrade to 16GB soon~

8GB are more than enough. Sometimes PoE, BF4, TF2 is open the same time (also before i got 16GB)


I upgraded to 16GB because i just tested around with the Hyper-V and virtual machines.