should I go to 8GB

[Fanatical Meat]

Above says it all, I currently have a Q9650 with 4GB and an nvidia 260. I mostly game and web I have minimal over clock interest. DDR2 seems to be getting more expensive and I am wondering if I would see any benefit (I do tend to own my PC's for a long time) I am running Vista64.

 

[jdjbuffalo]

If all you do is game and basic computing then no you wouldn't see much if any advantage. Most games won't use more than about 2-3GB. So unless you want to run other stuff in the background while gaming then I doubt you'll hit the wall.

A good way for you to test this out is load up the newest and most demanding game you have. Then ALT-TAB out and look at your total memory usage (You'll need to look at the amount cached for Vista). If it's below 512MB then yeah you might see a small benefit now and some benefit in the near future. Otherwise, you don't really need to upgrade. I doubt you'll see more than a couple games in the next 2 years that really need more than 4GB. 4GB is the standard for most people now.

 

[Emulex]

i built a few vm's the other day and i must say the speed did go up a bit at the 8 and 16gb mark. not much gain from 8 to 16GB but definite gain in less paging for some reason from 4gb.

 

[jimhsu]

I must say 8GB is useful if you plan to do any sort of development work (programming, modeling, etc). After effects in particular chews up memory like water - for a quad core, 8GB isn't even enough. For me, it's been useful for game modding - 4GB is a little too small to handle 2 instances of a modern 3D game, editor, photoshop, 3ds max, and browser all at once.

If you don't develop content, I suppose 8GB at this point in time is of little use.