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How do you know if you need more RAM?

C

cardshark828

Junior Member
I currently have 6GB DDR3 installed, and when I first enter windows my memory usage is 35% in the memory gadget. It peaks at around 70% when playing games. Is that considered high enough for adding more RAM to make a difference? I'm thinking of adding another 3x 2GB so I would have 12GB in total.
 
6GB is already overkill for 98% of users.
Pretty much all games don't need over 2GB.

And no, it won't make any difference at all in your case, if all you do is play games.
 
cardshark828 said:
I currently have 6GB DDR3 installed, and when I first enter windows my memory usage is 35% in the memory gadget. It peaks at around 70% when playing games. Is that considered high enough for adding more RAM to make a difference? I'm thinking of adding another 3x 2GB so I would have 12GB in total.
Click to expand...
Is Windows having to page out, making you wait on the hard drive for tasks other than opening and saving files? If not, you don't need more RAM.
 
Easy way... install a desktop widget that monitors cpu and ram usage. Watch the widget, if it goes up to over 80% of RAM usage, definitely consider more RAM.

For example, my old notebook had only 2GB of RAM and was constantly bumping up against the ceiling. My current desktop has 12GB of RAM and almost never crosses 50% usage. So... my notebook needs more RAM and my desktop doesn't. Although I might get more RAM in my desktop anyways, just to have it... my precious...
 
Tom's Hardware had a nice article about getting more RAM recently, and they seemed to think that beyond 8GB of RAM was not needed for gaming.

More than 8GB is typically helpful if you do a lot of video editing, virtualization, or use a RAM disk.
 
Once you have enough ram to run everything you need, more won't do anything to make your system run any better.
 
W7:
Start -> run -> resource monitor

Goto Memory, and look at Hard Faults / Sec.

typically its OK to have hard faults from what im reading.
But hard faults tell u how much of a shortage u have.

So id say if u see a number in hard faults which hits over 2000 when ur doing something, then id say get more ram to try to reduce that number.
 
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