Need more than 4gigs of RAM for gaming?

I have 4 gigs of OCz Reapers, just upgraded a few weeks ago, and I'm loving them.

However, I've seen a number of recent builds from people specifically in the WoW community shoving in up to 12gigs of RAM. Is there any reason that this is necessary?

One person said that the reason they want that much memory is to run multiple instances of WoW, for Multiboxing. (Which is legal in the ToU) But I still can't see if the system can utilize that much memory, or if it's even necessary.

He did his homework and got Vista Home Premium which actually recognizes all the RAM. But I was wondering if anyone could give me any more depth to the situation.

Maybe I should be picking up some more reapers?

Well it's not necessary unless you plan to have multiple instances of a game open like you mention. First of all, you can only access more than 3.X GB of memory if you're using a 64-bit OS. Second, this month's Maximum PC magazine did a comparison of a system equipped with 2 GB, 3 GB, and 6 GB of memory (running Vista 64, of course), and found that gaming benchmarks were unaffected by the amount of memory even when doing major multi-tasking. Of course, some synthetic benchmarks showed significant improvement during the multi-tasking with higher amounts of memory.

Of course memory is very cheap these days, so some people will want to just get the extra memory and be done with it.

i have 3 gigs in my P4 system I'm currently using and i can open 2 instances of wow no major issues, frame rate suffers a bit but nothing nasty. but 12 for wow seems a bit much unless hes running 4 or more toons at once.

i think most of the people run 4gb not really alot of games that will use more than that

The 12GB mark is someone with an i7 chip filling up on RAM. Its nowhere near nessasary.

4gb is enough for any game I have found. Even when you have other stuff open.

Pretty much all what I assumed. And yeah, Joedy, I have 4gigs and can run 3-4 instances of WoW with 20-30fps, which is fine for me.

Exige said:

Pretty much all what I assumed. And yeah, Joedy, I have 4gigs and can run 3-4 instances of WoW with 20-30fps, which is fine for me.

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get this: http://thetravelinsider.info/travelaccessories/coolitchiller.htm it will increase your fps if used with a beer