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16gb ram user experience

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Since it's better to have it and not need it than the other way round, I'd put 16GB in. My mobo has four slots, so I started out with 8GB and once I started using PS and LR daily, I filled the other slots for about $70. While upgrades tend to just move the bottleneck around, 16GB of DDR3 and a 500GB 850 EVO have given my CPU about all the elbow room it needs. I don't OC, so stock speeds on everything seem plenty fast for me.
 
Have a new(ish) system with 16 Gigs and a 4 core i5. It often is 50% RAM in use and most of the rest cached.

Aside from booting from a spinner, it's very fast and responsive.

I often have a game running with chrome opened to 5+ tabs as well as Firefox opened to the same number. Along with streaming via Windows Media Player and a couple of system/temp monitoring programs.


Thinking of putting in an M.2 SSD to decrease the boot times to <= 20 seconds.

Seeing as how even with a game (or two) running two browsers with many tabs open as well as other miscellaneous programs opened at once puts my memory usage at about 50% going up to 16 GB probably won't be a huge difference from staying at 8.

Anyone building a new system I'd say get 16 GB, but if you have 8 GB and are considering moving up to 16 GB your mileage may vary.


*e2a*

Since you're looking at the new GTA game which may be very memory demanding and 16 GB would cost < $70 I'd say go ahead and pull the trigger on it. I have my pagefile on a fixed amount based on the system recommended amount (~ 3 gigs).
Since some programs get fussy if there is no pagefile I left it active since the performance gains by eliminating it seem minimal to me.

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I have 32gb and don't mess with the swap file. I let Windows manage it and don't give it a second thought.
 
16 GB is overkill for the average user. Hell the average user browsing web + email can work with 4 GB.

Keep in mind that if hibernation is enabled you need 16 GB of free space and that space will be on the c: drive (eg. the SSD) wasting a lot of space. With SSD and that much RAM I would disable hibernation.
 
2is said:
I have 32gb and don't mess with the swap file. I let Windows manage it and don't give it a second thought.
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Same. I find that futzing with that stuff accomplishes nothing. I let Windows handle it and it works just fine.
 
beginner99 said:
16 GB is overkill for the average user. Hell the average user browsing web + email can work with 4 GB.

Keep in mind that if hibernation is enabled you need 16 GB of free space and that space will be on the c: drive (eg. the SSD) wasting a lot of space. With SSD and that much RAM I would disable hibernation.
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Sadly not true anymore, especially if you use chrome. My 8GB tablet is floating around 4.1-4.7GB used with <20 tabs open in chrome along with a few tabs in firefox, and a few apps like pdf reader. Out of curiosity I opened task manager, the chrome tabs take anywhere from 26MB to 185MB each. It adds up fast...
 
beginner99 said:
Hell the average user browsing web + email can work with 4 GB.
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fleshconsumed said:
Sadly not true anymore, especially if you use chrome. My 8GB tablet is floating around 4.1-4.7GB used with <20 tabs open in chrome along with a few tabs in firefox, and a few apps like pdf reader.
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I think almost everyone who posts in these forums are not average users.

I doubt the average user is opening up two browsers with multiple tabs in each one (much less more than 3 or 4 in one browser)

But yeah since newer PCs are often being sold with 8 gigs of ram I doubt browsers will refrain from resource requirement creep. And the time will arrive when 4 gigs of ram will no longer be enough for an average user either.


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tortillasoup said:
You see it as efficient hardware utilization, I see it as waste. You may think all that ram utilization is great, but it's not when you spend a great deal of time waiting for the HDD to load content because you've run out of ram. I probably spend 10 minutes an hour just waiting for things to finish loading from the HDD or having memory sent to the page file because of insufficient memory. See I think 4GB of ram should be more than plenty for web browsing yet Chrome/Firefox do not and instead, I get to suffer for it. I spend a great deal of time waiting for things to load due to insufficient ram. Your solution is just buy more ram, but all I can go to is 8GB. Why should I need 8GB of memory to use the internet comfortably? I didn't need this much memory 10 years ago and I'm doing the EXACT SAME THING as I was 10 years ago. On another computer, I've been able to tap out 16GB of ram on a regular basis with just tabbed browsing. You call that efficient?! I don't! In 2005, I could have the same # of tabs open and I'd have maybe 1GB of ram usage. The difference was, back then, the experience was quick and comfortable. Now? I use an assload of ram and the web browsing experience is slow as shit because the constant page file utilization due to 'insufficient' memory.


Utilizing ram is great and all but you know you've got a bloated web browsing experience when your computer becomes dog slow because '8gb' of ram 'isn't enough'.
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Why are you still running an OS off a slow hard drive in 2016 and not an SSD.
 
Makaveli said:
Why are you still running an OS off a slow hard drive in 2016 and not an SSD.
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SSDs are expensive and are failure prone.... not to mention diminished capacity. one thing that always bothered me about HDDs is how sensitive they are to heat, SSDs are significantly worse in this regard!
 
Decided to check out Fallout 4 with VMMap; the game uses around 7.3GB of RAM unmodded. Factor in Widows 7's ~3.5GB usage with no programs 'n' cockery running...Yah, 8GB ain't enough these days.
 
tortillasoup said:
SSDs are expensive and are failure prone.... not to mention diminished capacity. one thing that always bothered me about HDDs is how sensitive they are to heat, SSDs are significantly worse in this regard!
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I thought the failure rate on a Hard drive is higher due to all the moving parts which the SSD doesn't have, at most you may have a controller failure on the SSD. There are many things that can break on the HDD.

Most ssd's use maybe 25% or less power than a standard HDD so I would expect the Hard drive to be worse with heat than an SSD since its generates more of it.

Hard drives are bad with vibrations example a laptop being dropped usually equal dead HD not dead SSD.

I don't see anything listed that would make me choose a Hard drive over an SSD for an OS drive.

I think you need to try a current generation SSD instead of clinging to old hardware for your OS drive. Then you won't have to worry about a slow HD when you are out of ram.
 
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tortillasoup said:
SSDs are expensive and are failure prone.... not to mention diminished capacity. one thing that always bothered me about HDDs is how sensitive they are to heat, SSDs are significantly worse in this regard!
Click to expand...

I think the only way SSDs are worse in regards to heat is if there is poor design in the case. I noticed in a laptop with an SSD boot drive and an HDD for Data that the palm rest area over the HDD was noticeably warmer than the palm rest over the SSD.

SSDs imo generally generate less heat than HDDs and the technology is mature enough that I would recommend them as boot drives for anyone who isn't an idiot when it comes to backing up data.

If they insist on not backing up data then an HDD isn't going to save them in the event of a catastrophic storage failure either...

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Makaveli said:
I thought the failure rate on a Hard drive is higher due to all the moving parts which the SSD doesn't have, at most you may have a controller failure on the SSD. There are many things that can break on the HDD....
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It is. tortillasoup is just making stuff up. Storeagereview lists the average MTBF at 2 million hours for an SSD, 1.5 for a hard drive. And TBH, I wouldn't be surprised if SSD's have sprung ahead even morethan they were when this article was written.
http://www.storagereview.com/ssd_vs_hdd
 
tortillasoup said:
SSDs are expensive and are failure prone.... not to mention diminished capacity. one thing that always bothered me about HDDs is how sensitive they are to heat, SSDs are significantly worse in this regard!
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Respectfully disagree on all counts. My first SSD is still going strong, as is my latest SSD. HDD's create a ton more heat, so even if SSD's are more prone to heat (which I'm not even sure how accurate that statement is, but lets assume it is) you would need some sort of external heat source to even get them to the same level of an idle HDD much less an active one, making this about as non-issue as non-issue gets unless for some strange reason you're mounting your SSD to the back of your GPU.
 
tortillasoup said:
Excessive paging to the HDD, especially with MLC type memory will kill the SSD fairly quickly.
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LOL. That's all I have to say about that.

BTW, I checked my friend's M500 120GB SSD, with Win7 64-bit on it, with Crucial Storage Executive. A little over 1.1years worth of power-on time. 2% used up. At that rate, it will last 50 years! Tell me how many HDDs last more than 10 years? (Or modern 1TB+ HDDs, more than 3-4 years?)

Edit: Think of SSDs, like GIANT rolls of T.P. You use it up, slowly, as you store your s*** on it. Big deal. When it wears out, buy something new.
 
tortillasoup said:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2920...s-in-a-warm-room-can-kill-your-data-fast.html
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My laptop has been off for more than two weeks at a time and not shown any sign of data corruption.

I've been selling SSDs since early 2012, no data integrity issues or failures yet. HDDs on the other hand are still failing at more or less their usual rate seemingly; I still get a rush of failing drives in when the seasons change (did someone say temperature variation?).

The fact of the matter is, any bit of data that you don't want to lose ought to be backed up. In the meantime, I far prefer to have Windows booting in about ten seconds, app startup times to be at least twice as fast as they are off HDD and no noise.

Excessive paging to the HDD, especially with MLC type memory will kill the SSD fairly quickly. Read cycles aren't the problem, its the excessive write cycles that are the issue.
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You may want to check Techreport's SSD endurance tests. That's a lot of writes.

I have the same model as the one that lasted longest, which IIRC was 2.4PB of writes. In a couple of months' time I'll have had my SSD for two years, and currently it has clocked 3.7TB of writes (I have not been trying to "go easy" on it, no tweaking at all to try and reduce writes to the drive). If the endurance trial results are anything to go by, this SSD is probably going to last me way longer than any HDD I've used before replacing it for something bigger/faster, and that's even factoring in the fact that this drive is an order of magnitude faster than any I've ever run so I'll probably keep it for longer.
 
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I haven't had an SSD fail yet, I watched reviews about them a long time when they were new before I even bought a couple a few years back.

If you're using them on a page file, or defragging them you're doing it wrong I would think.

Just for starters. You can leave a page file on HDD's and let windows manage it and turn it off on SSD boot disks.

Everyone here knows better than that I suppose...
 
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MongGrel said:
I haven't had an SSD fail yet, I watched reviews about them a long time when they were new before I even bought a couple a few years back.

If you're using them on a page file, or defragging them you're doing it wrong I would think.

Just for starters. You can leave a page file on HDD's and let windows manage it and turn it off on SSD boot disks.

Everyone here knows better than that I suppose...
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I don't know how often you guys change your HDDs but I wouldn't trust an SSD to last 10+ years, at least not yet. I still have HDDs from the early 90s - 2000s in use. The SSD seem like they're great when they're new but if they get old, they just won't last. It's true they'll handle physical shock better but if I want to have an older system just sit on the shelf and then boot it up some time later, there is a risk the data won't be there. I've had electrolytic capacitors fail before I've had HDDs fail. In fact, I plan to make a thread about the awesome quality of ECS's electrolytic capacitors in a motherboard that I THOUGHT would have steer clear of those doomed capacitors.
 
tortillasoup said:
I don't know how often you guys change your HDDs but I wouldn't trust an SSD to last 10+ years, at least not yet.

but if I want to have an older system just sit on the shelf and then boot it up some time later, there is a risk the data won't be there.
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You do have a valid point regarding cold storage and flash memory. Unless it is very new, I wouldn't trust an *unpowered* SSD to store data for more than a few years. But powered? In a system? Should be fine. Likewise, running an MLC drive with paging. Should last way past when it might be considered "obsolete".
 
MongGrel said:
If you're using them on a page file, or defragging them you're doing it wrong I would think.
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In my experience, if a system with an SSD is set up correctly, the SSD does not get defragged automatically, ever (ie. no setting changes with regard to defrag config).

As for the page file, SSD or HDD, everyone's advice is to ensure that you have enough RAM so that the page file doesn't get used. HDD thrashing is not a good thing, neither is running with low RAM.

tortillasoup said:
I don't know how often you guys change your HDDs but I wouldn't trust an SSD to last 10+ years, at least not yet.
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Define "trust"...? I wouldn't have any appreciable level of confidence in any HDD to predict that it will last for more than ten years. Obviously I have seen some last that long, but again, it's common knowledge that the most common time for a HDD to fail is in the first five years.

As for SSDs I don't have that level of trust for them either because obviously I haven't been using them for that long, but the fact that they have no moving parts is a potential massive plus in their favour.

tortillasoup said:
I still have HDDs from the early 90s - 2000s in use. The SSD seem like they're great when they're new but if they get old, they just won't last. It's true they'll handle physical shock better but if I want to have an older system just sit on the shelf and then boot it up some time later, there is a risk the data won't be there. I've had electrolytic capacitors fail before I've had HDDs fail. In fact, I plan to make a thread about the awesome quality of ECS's electrolytic capacitors in a motherboard that I THOUGHT would have steer clear of those doomed capacitors.
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I think your argument applies just as well to any new technology. Better stick with those Pentium 3s, anything newer might be "unreliable". I've personally seen way more HDDs fail than motherboards, probably 10x more, and yes, I saw plenty of dead boards during the "capacitor plague".
 
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mikeymikec said:
I think your argument applies just as well to any new technology. Better stick with those Pentium 3s, anything newer might be "unreliable". I've personally seen way more HDDs fail than motherboards, probably 10x more, and yes, I saw plenty of dead boards during the "capacitor plague".
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I make it a point to rotate fresh new HDDs in every 3-4 years. Regardless if the current drive is bad-sector free. (If it is, then I may re-purpose it or sell it off.)
 
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