more RAM?

[ohfour238]

out of curiosity, at what point is more RAM needed? right now i have 4gb of DDR3 1600mhz. what could i possibly be doing that would demand more RAM? i've playing games like Crysis maxed out, do HD video editing in Premiere Pro. wondering where i'd benefit with 6 or 8 gigs of RAM like i see some of you have.

 

[tweakboy]

If your using Winblowz 7 64bit your gonna need 8GB if you do DAW or video editing and want other apps open too at same time.

W7 eats up avg 1400 1500mb RAM so out of the 8 your left with 6.5GB ram, then theres the cache which steals another 1.5GB so your really left with about 5.5GB of ram for apps and games which is enough for games. But if you wanna get into digital audio workstation or video rendering then you need 8GB recommended. If your a single tasker and plays Crysis its fine, Games take up maybe 1.5GB at the most soo out of 3.5gb left after cache thats plenty for a 1.5GB map game. good luck and thanks gg and gb

 

[ohfour238]

yes i do have W7 64bit. i've done some video editing in Premiere Pro with hefty HD video files and it seems to do fine with it. i haven't gotten TOO complex with it yet though so i'm not sure if i'll see the drop off then or not. was just wondering. thanks for the input.

 

[Blain]

Are you editing video with Premiere Pro while playing Crysis maxed out?

 

[ohfour238]

no haha. no i usually work one demanding thing at a time.

 

[khansolo]

You're probably fine with 4GB. I've played Crysis and have done video encoding with 4GBs of memory on Win7 x64 and have never really seen any memory insufficiency problems.

 

[darckhart]

running a bunch of VMs concurrently.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

W7 eats up avg 1400 1500mb RAM

Eh what? I have 2GB in my laptop. And I'm fairly certain that at the moment there are 840MB used and 1066MB free as reported by Task Manager.

 

[jimhsu]

After Effects! God that thing chews up memory like nobody's business.

Adobe actually recommends 2GB of FREE memory per core when rendering. That means 8GBs of memory isn't enough on a quad-core system if you want to maximize rendering speed. Most systems I see these days built for AE have closer to 12GB.

Those are guidelines for normal (~720p) resolutions. If you work with 2K RED video, then I haven't got a clue.

 

[jimhsu]

Eh what? I have 2GB in my laptop. And I'm fairly certain that at the moment there are 840MB used and 1066MB free as reported by Task Manager.

That depends on the amount of free memory you have. Have less memory? Windows 7 will use less of it.

 

[fuzzymath10]

I even run 2GB on Win7 x64. For moderate loads like HTPC use it's fine. I've never seen a reason to use more than 4GB yet without having all the other components in place such as a fast CPU and SSD. I haven't seen slowdowns with one XP VM, FF with a handful of tabs plus SC2 running, but maybe I should add a video conversion and see what happens. The main source of slowdowns is whenever my hard drives start getting used.

 

[Nothinman]

If your using Winblowz 7 64bit your gonna need 8GB if you do DAW or video editing and want other apps open too at same time.

W7 eats up avg 1400 1500mb RAM so out of the 8 your left with 6.5GB ram, then theres the cache which steals another 1.5GB so your really left with about 5.5GB of ram for apps and games which is enough for games. But if you wanna get into digital audio workstation or video rendering then you need 8GB recommended. If your a single tasker and plays Crysis its fine, Games take up maybe 1.5GB at the most soo out of 3.5gb left after cache thats plenty for a 1.5GB map game. good luck and thanks gg and gb

That's so wrong it's not funny. Windows adjusts it's memory usage to your hardware, it doesn't just arbitrarily eat 1.5G of memory for no reason. My laptop here has 2G and my commit charge is 1.6G with a half dozen apps running, at least 3 of which are pretty memory hungry themselves.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

After Effects! God that thing chews up memory like nobody's business.

Adobe actually recommends 2GB of FREE memory per core when rendering. That means 8GBs of memory isn't enough on a quad-core system if you want to maximize rendering speed. Most systems I see these days built for AE have closer to 12GB.

Those are guidelines for normal (~720p) resolutions. If you work with 2K RED video, then I haven't got a clue.

Yup, 12GB is the recommended minimum these days for a CS5 video editing machine.

 

[ohfour238]

hmm. well as of right now, i don't see anything that makes me think i HAVE to go get more RAM. i probably will upgrade it in the near future though, just so i have it. i'm sure once i start working with more complex scenes and projects in Premiere, it'll become useful. my board can hold up to 16gb so i'll have no problem accommodating whatever i'll need.

 

[taltamir]

If your using Winblowz 7 64bit your gonna need 8GB if you do DAW or video editing and want other apps open too at same time.

W7 eats up avg 1400 1500mb RAM so out of the 8 your left with 6.5GB ram, then theres the cache which steals another 1.5GB so your really left with about 5.5GB of ram for apps and games which is enough for games. But if you wanna get into digital audio workstation or video rendering then you need 8GB recommended. If your a single tasker and plays Crysis its fine, Games take up maybe 1.5GB at the most soo out of 3.5gb left after cache thats plenty for a 1.5GB map game. good luck and thanks gg and gb

A "blank" machine with just the OS and basic app took, for me: Windows XP 800MB. windows 7 1300MB. It varies based on your installed features, drivers, apps (anti virus, etc)
Cache does not take up ANYTHING... it is designed to use up unused ram to cache the HDD, but it can near instantly discard all of it whenever a program requests ram.
Games vary greatly. the most extreme case I know of is a game taking up 7.2GB of ram. There are several games that will go over 4GB, but as said. pretty rare.
The vast majority of games are 32bit only, and NOT large address aware...
A 32bit app is limited to 2GB of ram.
A 32bit app that is large address aware can take 4GB of ram.
A 64bit app can take more then you can throw at it.

the vast majority of games are 32bit non large address aware and CAN NOT take up more than 2GB of ram no matter how much ram you put in the machine, and whether your OS is 64bit or not (a 64bit OS can run 32bit apps)

 

[Emulex]

keep in mind that xp doesn't manage dynamics video cards say if you have a 9400m on motherboard to sli to a pair of 1GB video cards - that could eat 2.5gb of your ram in 32 bit done. windows 7 32bit would probably still lose most of that maybe 2.2gb gone.

64bit - all 4gb would be usable.