Hey guys, As they are doing some cool sale on the RAM these days, i was wondering if it was worth it upgrading from 8 to 16 GB. I know that with the ramdisk and rainmeter i'm around 40% usage of my 8gb on startup but i don't know if 16gb would help for anything when playing games (i think Skyrim is the game that takes up the most space so far with, like 4gb). What do u guys think ?
Yes it can help with that. You would be able to dedicate 8GB for read and write cache on the SSD which is always nice. Then be sure to set your Windows pagefile to use the SSD only and be of like 2-4GB in size. You probably still wont use the full 16GB, but you could easily use up 12GB or so. I just bought some of these sticks, they are pretty awesome. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313321
Whoever claims 16 gigs is useless has no idea how computers work. Your OS will allow its processes to use more RAM as the overall pool increases. Additionally, you can have a lot more shit open without seeing an impact. Example: I have a gazillion Chrome tabs open at any one time, and on top of that, I have Photoshop and/or Unity3D + Visual Studio open and often a game, too. You won't be able to do this without a noticable performance impact with less than 8 gigs. (I'm rarely using less than 10 gigs of RAM at once). Ultimately, you can turn off that damned page file completely, and not have an issue, thus freeing up space on your harddrive. All that being said, unused RAM is wasted RAM, and thus, wasted money. So if you rarely have demanding applications running, or if you actually close tabs in Chrome/Firefox, then the only reason for you to get that much RAM is to future-proof your computer.
It's not that you can't its that's most people won't see much benefit for some time yet (not that the time wont come...but when it does you probably won't want to be using your Sandybridge i5 anymore). Gamers don't need it to run even the highest-spec games until they get into running lots of other stuff at the same time. Sure there's some cases...but few except the crazies have a literal billion Chrome tabs open. And then there's "Yeah but I can have photoshop and CAD open and game too!" but that extra $100 on RAM is easily saved by just closing those things before you game - with SSDs start times are fractions of what they used to be and that's usually a better place to put your bucks than 16gb of RAM. So it makes over 8gb of RAM not a huge priority if you're a normal user/gamer looking to maximize performance/$.
Yeah, as for myself, besides my ramdisk (which is still 2GB) and rainmeter (takes around 400mb i think) i've got nothing open when i play games.
I paid 100 for 16 gb of 2133 patriot viper black mamba memory. I'm pretty sure I only go up to 4/6 Gb in a few games. Planetside was one of the biggest hogs but that was a while ago. Just daily usage I sit around 20% usage with everything loaded up (Pointable, Sound Blaster suite, Origin, Steam, Precision X, Logitech gaming software, geforce experience, rainmeter, MSE).
The only time I'm below 50% used of my 16 gigs is when I've just rebooted. And that only happens every once in a while, when my computer decides it doesn't want to go into sleep mode anymore, for whatever reason. I think one of the reasons people aren't closing in on using these amounts of RAM is because they had to manage their memory usage in the past, due to performance. RAM used to be much more expensive, and a much more valuable resource, so people have developed a habit of closing down applications when they need to start up others, or play games, etc. What people don't realise is, when you get 16 gigs of RAM, you no longer need to maintain this archaic habit. Unless the applications in the background, for some reason, get/need a lot of CPU time, even while in the background, or worse yet, use the GPU when in the same state, then there's no real reason to close them down anymore once you have the memory pool size for it.
Or, maybe, using lots of RAM is not typically a sign of a well made program, and we choose to use lighter weight programs and keep things streamlined. That brings it's own advantages in not just RAM capacity saved but in bandwidth usage. But that's sort of besides the point here: Even if it's cheaper than every before (though it's gone up somewhat recently), from a value perspective your money for >8gb is typically better spent on other components unless you have specific, non-gaming, needs. I know you want to keep hammering that's it's useful for some things but for most it's not a priority. I've got 16gigs because I got half of it free....but my computer usage experience, which is pretty much games and entertainment, wouldn't be any different, or constrained in any way, if I had opted for 8gb. And I run 1440p w/ a GTX780.
Or, maybe, we can just continue to completely disregard each other's arguments and let this one slide. I vote for that option.