16 GB ram

blankslate

Diamond Member
Jun 16, 2008
8,797
572
126
If you're semi-serious about gaming or just insist on having a browser or two along with some media player running in the background while you are gaming.

Or you work with a demanding program like Photoshop.

If not 8 GB is also reasonable, imo even 4GB is also reasonable if you have the OS and most programs on an SSD.

Most who read this forum would probably go with at least 16 GB of RAM I think.



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pcslookout

Lifer
Mar 18, 2007
11,959
157
106
Your query is quite generic, please specify...
What Industry?
What OS?
What applications are running simultaneously?

Sure.

Home User/Gamer
Windows 10
Games, Browser, Ad Blocker, NZB client, and sometimes a video or music player.
 

destrekor

Lifer
Nov 18, 2005
28,799
359
126
If you're semi-serious about gaming or just insist on having a browser or two along with some media player running in the background while you are gaming.

Or you work with a demanding program like Photoshop.

If not 8 GB is also reasonable, imo even 4GB is also reasonable if you have the OS and most programs on an SSD.

Most who read this forum would probably go with at least 16 GB of RAM I think.



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I would never recommend less than 8GB of ram in this day and age, unless you are a very light user who only uses a handful of browser tabs and don't often have other programs open.

My work desktop has 4GB of RAM and I silently curse to it every day. But I like to have a ton of things open, it's my way of working. Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, Shoretel, LogMeIn, quite a few Chrome tabs, Google Sheets in Chrome, and Outlook. The cursed thing often crawls with all that.

I can have all of that, a VM with my work stuff connected to a VPN, and like 50+ tabs across two Chrome windows, and my desktop with an i7-2600K and 16GB of RAM just keeps on cruising for days on end. I only restart for Windows updates.

If I am to play a heavy game like BF3 or 4, I'll usually restart to clear up memory and then enable Eyefinity. But I wont even do that for lighter games. I'll keep all my junk open and play Kerbal Space Program just fine on one monitor.

I may be more of an extreme user, especially when it comes to tabs. I hoard open tabs like a bad nightmare for some people. :awe:
 

ronbo613

Golden Member
Jan 9, 2010
1,237
45
91
You could get by with 8G RAM, depending on the games you play, no problem. If you have the means, 16G would be better.

Do you have an SSD? That would be a better investment than eight extra gigs of memory.
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 28, 2005
21,067
3,575
126
Is 16 GB of ram a standard now ?

completely depends on what standard we are looking at.

Home User Desktop standard? id say hellz no... they are fine at 4gb for the standard home user..

Standard Gamer / Social Media holic with 238493849230 browsers + twitch + whatever else they need - 8GB with the possibility of 16gb, depends on how much more whatever else they are running.

Hardcore Gamer PC - 32gb is standard... just for the fact that since ur dropping 3000 dollars on GPU on 3 titan X, u might as well go full bells and whistles are go max ram config on that board.
 

MajinCry

Platinum Member
Jul 28, 2015
2,495
571
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completely depends on what standard we are looking at.

Home User Desktop standard? id say hellz no... they are fine at 4gb for the standard home user..

4GB? That's cutting it awfully close. You'll need quite the pagefile; a fresh Windows install uses ~3GB of RAM after updates according to Task Manager, which doesn't report the actual RAM usage.

Firefox alone, with only one tab open, uses 1.2GB of RAM (via VMMap). You've already broken the ol' 4GB RAM limit there.

And modern games use loads of RAM. Granted, if you're playing Skyrim-era games, ya can get away with 8GB. But for current generation games (vanilla Fallout 4 uses 7.5GB of RAM), you're going to want that 16GB.