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4gb or 8gb ram for gaming

S

Seromontis

Member
I am building a new gaming computer and I'm trying to decide if I should get 8gb or 4gb of ram.
Here are the appropriate parts:
2x gpu
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130562
cpu
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115067
motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131601

I plan to get an ocz vertex 2(120gb) ssd in the next 6 months, but until then I will use my samsung spinpoint f3

Here are the two different memory sets:
8gb ram set
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231311
4gb ram set
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231321

I don't care about price, so if I plan to game and want my programs to start up fast, is it better to get the 4gb or 8gb. I hear a lot of people saying you just use 4gb anyways and therefore the extra 4gb is not needed.
 
Seromontis said:
I don't care about price, .
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Nothinman said:
More memory is always good, Windows will find a use for it.
Click to expand...
+1. 8GB FTW.

Some current games + the OS will put actual memory usage (not Windows Superfetch etc) well over 3GB. At or about 3.25GB to 3.5GB, your page file usage will skyrocket with 4GB in these cases. So, if you don't care about price, get 8GB as it will result in better overall system performance in this scenario.
 
Last edited:
If you don't care about price, why is there even a need to even ask?

If you don't care about price, why two GTX460 768MB? Why not two GTX480?
 
One thing no one has mentioned is overclocking. That 4GB set is rated at 1600MHz, the 8GB set is rated at 1333, so you have a lot more headroom in the 4GB set. Having more memory sticks typically gets in the way of overclocking...not sure if this is true for having the same number of higher-memory sticks. Maybe others can comment.
 
Blain said:
Are you using a 32 or 64-bit OS?
Click to expand...
I will be using a 64-bit OS

The reason I'm getting 2 gtx 460 768mb rather than 2 480s. That is a big price difference of around at least $400 and I can't fit that into my budget, while the ram difference is $40, and if it is much better than 4gb then I will most definitely get the 8gb over the 4gb ram.
 
Seromontis said:
I will be using a 64-bit OS

The reason I'm getting 2 gtx 460 768mb rather than 2 480s. That is a big price difference of around at least $400 and I can't fit that into my budget, while the ram difference is $40, and if it is much better than 4gb then I will most definitely get the 8gb over the 4gb ram.
Click to expand...

Honestly, this is what I would do:

(1) skip the SLI and get a GTX470. Most people will advise you against going SLI unless it's an upgrade to an existing card. Example card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814125320. It will save you about $25 over the GTX460 pair.

(2) skip the 8GB of memory and save about $45.

(3) take that money and put it towards buying an SSD right now. If you can't afford the 120GB Vertex 2 now, get the 60GB Vertex 2. The performance boost you'll get will be light years ahead of what another 4GB will give you, and you'll notice it more than the GTX460 in SLI for overall system use, and it will speed up game level loading. Plus it's a big hassle to upgrade your OS drive down the line, so if you know you want it, buy it now and install the OS on it.
 
8GB is the new 4GB. Pretty sure it will drop to $100 by years end if not $80, but if I were buying new now, I'd definitely get 8GB. I regularly see my ram usage hit 80% with 4GB.
 
Termie said:
Exactly - memory has almost nothing to do with that.



They've already dropped a lot. The 60GB OCZ drives hover around $120. There is no greater upgrade you can get for that money.
Click to expand...

I am not disagreeing about how good they are. Its just still a tech that will drop even more.
 
Seromontis said:
I am building a new gaming computer and I'm trying to decide if I should get 8gb or 4gb of ram.
Here are the appropriate parts:
2x gpu
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130562
cpu
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115067
motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131601

I plan to get an ocz vertex 2(120gb) ssd in the next 6 months, but until then I will use my samsung spinpoint f3

Here are the two different memory sets:
8gb ram set
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231311
4gb ram set
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231321

I don't care about price, so if I plan to game and want my programs to start up fast, is it better to get the 4gb or 8gb. I hear a lot of people saying you just use 4gb anyways and therefore the extra 4gb is not needed.
Click to expand...

What games do you play? If you play MMOs, the extra ram will help. If you don't, well I recently yanked half my ram out to RMA because it went bad. Honestly, I don't notice a speed difference going from 8 to 4 gigs.
 
I think I will go with the 4gb of ram that I picked out, it seems the general consensus is that the extra 4gb wouldn't make a noticeable difference, therefore no reason to spend $40 extra.
I am going with the 460's in sli over the 470 because by paying a simple $30 more I get 30-40% increase in fps in most games. What sort of issues should I expect from an SLI setup?

A question about ssd's.
Running 2 60gb vertex 2's in raid 0 is faster than a 120gb vertex 2?

I don't plan to buy the ssd's for another 6 months or so, waiting for 120gb to be around $150

I will be playing Crysis, Fallout3 and New Vegas, DragonAge, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Starcraft 2, and Mass Effect 2

also my resolution is 1920*1080
 
4GB is fine for a gaming system, I'd recommend it if you're on a tight budget. But if you can afford 8GB, I'd go for that. Win 7 will use it for caching, so it's not like it'd go to waste, and it will provide some future proofing.

Or get 4GB now and plan to buy another 4GB later to upgrade to 8GB. DDR3 prices have already gone down quite a bit and will continue to fall. Will hopefully eventually be like a few summers ago where you could get 4GB sets of DDR2 for next to nothing, $30 or something like that. 🙂
 
I've been running 8GB DDR2-800 for two years now, and I can tell you that it doesn't help much, and I always see my Vista/7 memory usage around 2GB-2.5GB even during heavy usage. Only a couple of times in 2 years when I was dealing with video or large WinRAR files did they exceed 5GB mark.

I've now gone down to 4GB since I need 4GB for another rig, and I really can't feel anything different..and this applies to games too. In fact, if you overclock, I think it is less stressful for the system with less memory/fewer sticks. With 2x2GB config, I am confident I can easily hit 3.8Ghz, but I dont' really need it right now. With 4x2GB, it could never get stable enough for 3.8Ghz. However, if you are getting DDR3, when each stick is 4GB, then I'd recommend getting 2 sticks and dual channel it for 8GB. It'll get you more ready for the future. Past experience doesn't mean that future games won't take advantage of more memory. And we're all talking about 64bit OS by the way.
 
For gaming 4GB is enough and there will be no thrashing it will load the textures and map into RAM and take about 1GB at most. Soo your fine.

However if you wanna do heavy multitasking or do video editing or run a DAW then you need 8GB especially if your using W7 .. Thanks gg and gl
 
GundamF91 said:
I've been running 8GB DDR2-800 for two years now, and I can tell you that it doesn't help much, and I always see my Vista/7 memory usage around 2GB-2.5GB even during heavy usage. Only a couple of times in 2 years when I was dealing with video or large WinRAR files did they exceed 5GB mark.

I've now gone down to 4GB since I need 4GB for another rig, and I really can't feel anything different..and this applies to games too. In fact, if you overclock, I think it is less stressful for the system with less memory/fewer sticks. With 2x2GB config, I am confident I can easily hit 3.8Ghz, but I dont' really need it right now. With 4x2GB, it could never get stable enough for 3.8Ghz. However, if you are getting DDR3, when each stick is 4GB, then I'd recommend getting 2 sticks and dual channel it for 8GB. It'll get you more ready for the future. Past experience doesn't mean that future games won't take advantage of more memory. And we're all talking about 64bit OS by the way.
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I thought the same thing about 8 GB sometimes but it can help with anything that is memory intensive. Can give you a simple website that when you open it up you will be glad you have 8 GB of ram at least. I seen the website alone, with more than one instance/tab of it open use up all 8 GB of ram lol. Was a little shocked at first but at how big the website is it really is not that surprising. No it is not malware and I doubt anyone wasn't to actually try it anyway. I found it when researching browsers. Someone was commenting on sites never really benchmark or strain browsers to their limits. I agree but who would visit a website that will consume all of your ram just by opening a few instances/tabs of it ? Then again who would open more than one instance/tab of the same website?
 
Absolution75 said:
8GB is the new 4GB. Pretty sure it will drop to $100 by years end if not $80, but if I were buying new now, I'd definitely get 8GB. I regularly see my ram usage hit 80% with 4GB.
Click to expand...

Really already ? I remember predicting this! Wow! I wonder how long it will take for 12 GB and 16 GB to become the new 8 GB? lol
 
My suggestion? Buy 1 460GTX 1 gig memory; 4 gigs ram, same MB/CPU and with the nearly $220 spend it on an ssd with the Samsung Spinpoint as the data HD. SSD makes a huge difference. If you look at my sig below my second machine has 4 gigs while my first has 8. No noticeable difference on MOH Tier1 or Rise of Flight.
 
guskline said:
My suggestion? Buy 1 460GTX 1 gig memory; 4 gigs ram, same MB/CPU and with the nearly $220 spend it on an ssd with the Samsung Spinpoint as the data HD. SSD makes a huge difference. If you look at my sig below my second machine has 4 gigs while my first has 8. No noticeable difference on MOH Tier1 or Rise of Flight.
Click to expand...

I highly disagree that SSD makes a huge difference. Now I didn't say it didn't make a difference but not huge. Yes I have a Intel G2 80 GB but I even tested going back to my WD Raptor 150 GB. I wouldn't mine if I had to go back.

Now if I had 10 + or even 50 system tray items on bootup I would say no way I am going back to anything less than a SSD. Otherwise I can live with a normal hard drive. That is the biggest difference I noticed with my Intel G2 80 GB is the startup speed especially when there was 10 or more system tray items. Though what pc geek has 10 or more system tray items load on their system startup everytime ? I don't even restart my pc that much. Except for windows updates. Tell me other reason why SSDs are worth it. You can't. I won't be buying another SSD until they get much faster where I can actually notice it in everything.
 
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