I know many a gamer who would answer that question with "you can never have too much memory!" Within the Minecraft server community I run, I hear this question every now and then when someone asks about upgrading their hardware, or purchasing new. Most times, I see other's responding to go for 16GB, which seems to be the defacto and gold standard for computers, especially gaming.
But is that too much? Techspot wrote up a detailed article to see what is the most economical option for RAM. This isn't necessarily about performance, but getting the most out of what you're paying for. They tested 4, 8 and 16GB worth of memory to see which one is the better deal. I do find it interesting they picked 4, but that could be because that was the standard for so long and as a control in the tests.
What their tests show is that there was marginal improvement with 16GB over 8GB, even with processes that required more than 8. I highly recommend reading over their article as they put their test machine through the passes. From rendering videos to even playing AAA games, like Batman: Arkham Knight (and playing that with 4GB of RAM!)
Our custom workload features a 17 minute video made up of dozens of small clips, images and audio tracks. To maximize system memory usage we turned the bitrate right down and this saw a total system memory usage of 12GB when encoding. With 16GB of memory installed the workload took 290 seconds. Surprisingly, with just 8GB of RAM the encoding time wasn't greatly impacted, now taking 300 seconds.I've been running off of 8GB of RAM on my personal computer for about three years, never noticed a problem with any of the games I play or programs I use. As long as their tests are accurate, it seems like you're mostly wasting your money or going for bragging rights shelling out for the 16GB option, for most cases. They do note a couple of times that 16GB did make a noticeable difference, and I know that for major rendering, you need a good amount of RAM to process.
What do you think? How much RAM are you using in your machines? Let us know in the comments below to see if your results match the article's. And as always, stay safe goblins.
My most recent ram upgrade was from an 8GB system, to a 32GB system, for me 32GB is actually quite reasonable, simply for the amount of virtual machines I run. 16GB died so I'm back down to 16GB of ram, and when running the amount of VM's I want to for testing purposes I do see some speed issues. But I'd admit I am an anomaly, 8GB is more than sufficient for the average run of the mill user, gamer, or enthusiast. When crunching VM's though.. more is better :-)
ReplyDeleteI agree with you're running VMs, more is better.
ReplyDeleteI'm running the same amount (32GB) in my virtual lab for all of my virtual machines. At this point, I believe I'm just shy of a dozen VMs with at least 1/3 of my total RAM left over. My main PC is the hypervisor. So, ~10 VMs and an otherwise busy hypervisor/Win10. I'm pretty surprised that the RAM utilization is as low as it is.
ReplyDeleteYou've got quite a setup there. What are you running on your VMs and what are you using them for?
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