RAM size matters, A LOT

[Drone]

 

[dj-electric]

The idea of this thread is funny to me.
RAM matter when you use it, course. I don't get why someone would get 8GB if he needs more, or 32GB of he needs less.
Of course that having more is better, but what use do i have for a house with 4 rooms if i only going to use 2.

 

[slozomby]

The idea of this thread is funny to me.
RAM matter when you use it, course. I don't get why someone would get 8GB if he needs more, or 32GB of he needs less.
Of course that having more is better, but what use do i have for a house with 4 rooms if i only going to use 2.

sometime relatives come over for visits?

most people don't know how much ram they need. and without detailed logs I cant tell you how much ram you need. I can guestimate. but saying I just use it for web browsing is misleading. do you have 1-5 tabs open in chrome or 20-30. that'll make a big difference in ram utilization.

I just use it for office. well are you editing 3 page docs or 300 page docs. are you linking inside the docs. do you have macros enabled........ heck outlook takes 3gb of ram cuz I have too many search folders.

 

[Aquinus]

Of course that having more is better, but what use do i have for a house with 4 rooms if i only going to use 2.

File caching and things like SuperFetch make the world a very responsive place in the desktop world. In the server world, when you're talking about accessing large numbers of files or working with databases, simply adding memory can improve performance by allowing more to be cached. For servers, your "house" is more like a warehouse. On the desktop, you're not used to using more than 16GB of memory but, at work I deal with data sets smaller than @xkm1948 but big enough to benefit from going from 15GB to 54GB. When you're working with things like historical data where you grab every change that occurs, being able to work with that completely in memory improves performance by leaps and bounds. It also helps things like native command queueing do its job by saturating I/O capability when data isn't available in system memory because you can grab more at once.

Just understand that when working with computers professionally, you can have much different requirements than playing a video game or working in an office. Working with large data sets is a very different animal and you can't compare them. Games don't use 54GB of memory, databases can and they will.

 

[Prima.Vera]

I use 3D software such as CATIA/Solid Works/AEgis, etc that, for example, if you have a huge assembly, let's say an engine, it will eat all your RAM in an instant. My station has 2 Xeon CPUs with 128GB of RAM , and still slower than I would love too. My RAM goes all the way to 120GB sometimes, during parts manipulation or when rendering objects, so it all depends on your needs.

 

[Solaris17]

Ram usage is my top concern in my job. Those VMs get pretty pissed when you start running out. Hell even really small Windows shops with a WSUS server can easily see 80+% of its ram used because SQL eats ram like candy.

Gaming wise? IDK my personal rig had 32GB in it, but I also worked from my amchine some nights. I cant say a strictly gaming computer needs over 16GB of ram right now.

Professionally is a totally different story.

When you have more RAM than you need people tell you you arent being frugal, you are spending money where it isnt needed.

In the professional world if my production servers go into save state because of resource exhaustion than we lose thousands compared to the few hundred we would have spent on memory.

Sure a simulation crash sucks. it sucks even more if the data is part of a million dollar deal.

Its all about perspective. in my mind both professionally and casually if you can afford it (and lets be real even DDR4 is ridiculously cheap) then buy it. one day you will need it and waiting for that $80 to pay for itself is alot easier than losing $$$$$$$$$$ because you didn't think ahead.

 

[yoyo2004]

I am running on 16 GB desktop system and I often run out of memory when running multi-softwares, browsers..etc.

My future build will definitely have around 32GB of ram, hopefully with Zen if the price is right. I love to keep all softwares running + Game If I want to without the need to close some stuff xD.

 

[cdawall]

I am running on 16 GB desktop system and I often run out of memory when running multi-softwares, browsers..etc.

My future build will definitely have around 32GB of ram, hopefully with Zen if the price is right. I love to keep all softwares running + Game If I want to without the need to close some stuff xD.

What software are we talking about? 16GB in a consumer system shouldn't ever run out unless you are just full of viruses.

 

[alucasa]

Depends on people's needs really.

For me, RAM is not much of a concern. # of CPU core is however.

For gamers (majority of ppl on TPU), GPU is top priority.

For general computing (web browsing & office word), I don't think people need more than 8gb RAM.

 

[yoyo2004]

What software are we talking about? 16GB in a consumer system shouldn't ever run out unless you are just full of viruses.

One internet browser with many tabs is enough to make you run out of memory!

One Software like solid works, matlab, labview...etc + two Internet browsers running = boom out of memory.
or running two browsers + one game = boom close to be out of memory..etc.

My laptop feels unusable, cause it only has like 8gb

 

[cdawall]

One internet browser with many tabs is enough to make you run out of memory!

One Software like solid works, matlab, labview...etc + two Internet browsers running = boom out of memory.
or running two browsers + one game = boom close to be out of memory..etc.

My laptop feels unusable, cause it only has like 8gb

Right so nothing a standard consumer would use.

I would also love to see how many tabs it would take to use 16GB. Even using the memory whore that is chrome that works out to more than 60.

 

[ratirt]

Right so nothing a standard consumer would use.

I would also love to see how many tabs it would take to use 16GB. Even using the memory whore that is chrome that works out to more than 60.

Yeah. 16 GiB and all used for browsing? I would love to see that. Maybe i'll make a test at home and see how many tabs I would need to open in the browser to eat all the 16GiB of RAM. Rarely possible to accomplished. Unless you wanna prove your point and open xxx tabs but who opens so many though?

 

[slozomby]

Unless you wanna prove your point and open xxx tabs

yup porn popups out of control are the only time I've seen it.

 

[Komshija]

For average non-demanding user 8GB of RAM is enough, 16GB is enough for pretty much everyone (including hardcore gamers), except for those who do lots of video and RAW image edits.

yup porn popups out of control are the only time I've seen it.

Not just porn, music and software sites are also full of pop-ups.

 

[GeneO]

Welp, mainly because i never thought it would crash my lab computer. I was expecting it to be extremely slow for a 8gb. But completely crash it really surprised me.

Sounds like your application has a bug.

 

[slozomby]

Sounds like your application has a bug.

running out of both physical and virtual memory will cause a machine to crash.

 

[cdawall]

Yeah. 16 GiB and all used for browsing? I would love to see that. Maybe i'll make a test at home and see how many tabs I would need to open in the browser to eat all the 16GiB of RAM. Rarely possible to accomplished. Unless you wanna prove your point and open xxx tabs but who opens so many though?

I currently have FO4 open and still am nowhere near maxing out 16GB

 

[eidairaman1]

What software are we talking about? 16GB in a consumer system shouldn't ever run out unless you are just full of viruses.

Or page file is turned off...

My OS uses ~2GB the rest is for whatever programs running

For garbage sites and non garbage sites, warez etc use no script, avast, spyware blaster, malware bytes, super antispyware. Or just stop going to illicit sites period.

running out of both physical and virtual memory will cause a machine to crash.

Make it run excessively slow

 

[xvi]

Only time I realistically need 32GB of RAM is when I'm compressing data with 7zip using all 12 threads.

I told myself I needed lots of RAM for 7zip so I could compress things super nicely, but I almost never used it. Of course, those that do will need it, but even though I thought I was that person, it turns out I actually wasn't that person.

 

[xkm1948]

Another typical day of workload. This is without any background application running. Looks like I may have to look into 256/512GB RAM options in a year or two.

 

[jboydgolfer]

 

[EarthDog]

Cause using half my ram makes me want to upgrade?

Congrats on your one-off use... neat to see when not on a server...though ive seen hundreds of gb used there.

 

[xkm1948]

Cause using half my ram makes me want to upgrade?

Congrats on your one-off use... neat to see when not on a server...though ive seen hundreds of gb used there.

Nah this is before i start the background assembly pipeline, which usually takes another 40~50GB

This is just running the genome assembly. I tried running analysis program and assembly program together once. It crashed my system due to I naively disabled page file. Once the RAM usage surpass 120GB the system will not response anymore.


I leave the real heavy lifting to the HPC clusters though. Some plants genome assembly takes close to 600GB.

 

[hckngrtfakt]

I've been doing professional video editing and post production alongside web design and HEAVY photoshop for nearly 3 years on a mac pro with 32gbs of ram, and I swear I have never come close to using EVEN half of that.
32gbs was simply a fall over, but in a real pro environment i've never seen a single person use more than that (and yes, i've seen 3d studios render CAD designs but they have specialized hardware which uses almost the same RAM as most pro plevel computers)

 

[xkm1948]

I've been doing professional video editing and post production alongside web design and HEAVY photoshop for nearly 3 years on a mac pro with 32gbs of ram, and I swear I have never come close to using EVEN half of that.
32gbs was simply a fall over, but in a real pro environment i've never seen a single person use more than that (and yes, i've seen 3d studios render CAD designs but they have specialized hardware which uses almost the same RAM as most pro plevel computers)

Large scale Bioinformatics are crazy on computation power. Don't you find it amazing we manage to package such colossal amount of data into almost all of our individual cells? Our cells and genes are the true super quantum computers.