How much RAM is overdoing it?

I was just wondering how much RAM you all thought is overdoing it? For example the latest motherboards support 24GB, would anyone in their right mind ever put that much?

In some cases, less is more.

Not in this case.

;p

/uneducated answers

Depends on whether you want to overclock. The less memory sticks generally the greater an overclock can be achieved.

Also depends on what you use your system for. Myself, I've never managed to use more than 60% of my systems memory capacity and thats just 4GB. Kind of standard these days.

Well, for me, looking forward having built 5 pcs for myself over time and 6 for other people... I only used what I needed because of the cpu, however now, with my current board being able to go to 8 gigs and a quad 775, i still have a lot of room left.

My next system, if quad / hex / oct core whatever it may be when its time to put this pc out to the fields, I will with out a doubt, be looking at a minimum of 6 gigs of ram. and if by a miracle of god we get blessed with the prices of memory like we did from 2006-2008 I will max that **** to the brim!

killem2 said:

Well, for me, looking forward having built 5 pcs for myself over time and 6 for other people... I only used what I needed because of the cpu, however now, with my current board being able to go to 8 gigs and a quad 775, i still have a lot of room left.

My next system, if quad / hex / oct core whatever it may be when its time to put this pc out to the fields, I will with out a doubt, be looking at a minimum of 6 gigs of ram. and if by a miracle of god we get blessed with the prices of memory like we did from 2006-2008 I will max that **** to the brim!

Click to expand...

Not much choice if you're going with an i7. I mean, Triple channel means either 3GB or 6GB. I'd be unconforable running less than 4GB so 6 it would have to be.

More RAM can limit your overclock so that's the only real negative (excluding price)
At the moment I would say 4GB is enough but 6GB (3x2GB not 2x3GB, I've found it's faster) is nice to have since you might go over 4 with some applications.

I feel comftable running 3 gigs but 2 gigs is to low for me. I stick with 4 to give me the head room though.

max 8GB tbh..

8gb ddr2 and 12gb ddr3 is either luxury or over the top for me lol.
4gb for ddr2 is the sweet spot, becuase any more only really helps benchmark scores.
i would only get 12gb for bragging rights

I had 8GIG of 1066 DDR2 in my system... but it was overvolted to `make it have it!` with the same clocks.

result = 4GIG dead with 80% errors type fried #Laughs#

if your planning on a fair bit in a system, make sure its upto the job

128gb is too much but thoose server guys do like their ram

It all depends on your software requirements. Ideally you never want to use any Virtual Memory (unless your into SSD drives ofcourse). When your system gets close to maxing out it'll start reading and writing to and from your virtual memory (which is stored on your hard drive). This is bad. In most cases your hard drive is drastically slower than your DRAM. This will slow down your programs.
I've found best way to tell is lower your Virtual Memory to the Min (16MB), and see how often your system locks up or crashes. If this happens often... you need more memory. When buying more memory keep in mind lower latency is more important than size. If you can dump memory faster than you can create it you can get by with 3 bytes of memory.

There is only 1 thing to really consider no matter what anyone else says. what do you plan on doing with your machine to justify the use of more than 6GB - 8GB of ram.

if you are running virtual machines or programs that use large amounts of memory, then yes this would justify that.

If your that guy who thinks he uses alot of ram with his infrequent photoshop/gaming/video encoding/overclocking then you really should stay betweent he 4GB and 8GB range.

if your a strict gamer/overclocker you should have 4GB or 6GB and nothing else. 2 channels 2 dimms 3 channels 3 dimms. 2GB capacity for best latency/performance.

I have 8 gigs of Memory and everyone talked about better overclocks on less Memory, so I took out 4 gigs. I saw no difference in my Overclock, I could not get my overclock higher, nor could I lower my voltages. Obviously YMMV but for me it didn't make a difference.

I went ahead and Maxed mine out at 8Gigs because realistically we are talking another 70 dollars and if the ram prices continue like they have been, you'd be happy to have bought more when you start needing more. I build mine to be overkill so I won't have to upgrade for another 5 years. Five years ago 2GB was Standard, 5 years before that it was 512MB and before that it was 128MB.

4 GB for dual channel motherboards
6 GB for triple channel motherboards

Right now more than that is wasting money.

Unless you like running a lot of VMs, then you may need 8+ GBs.

Right now, 4 gigs for dual channel and 6 gigs for tri channel is the sweet spot considering pricing, performance, and headroom. Most people never use past 1.5gigs (most people meaning everyone using a more modern PC with Windows 7 on it) on a weekly basis with the occasional peak to maybe 1.6gigs. My only proof of that is from constantly 'fixing' family, friends, and neighbors computers and seeing them have 20 windows open at once. I myself never get past 2gigs when using The Gimp, MilkShape3D (3D modeling program) and a couple instances of Windows Visual Studio 2008 enterprise. I like to have 4gigs of ram because it allows memory to be allocated in adjacent blocks. When a program starts it automatically allocates memory for it's main executable, constants, dynamic variables, and resources. All of that data being loaded needs a pretty big chunk of memory to be allocated all at once. And as you know, memory that is adjacent to each other can be accessed quicker then memory that is thrown all over the place. So, for best performance, you want all the memory to be in the same place, so your OS looks for a place in memory that's big enough to fit it. So more memory means a higher likely hood of their being free space big enough to fit it all in one place without breaking it up. This concept is similar to a fragmented hard drive. A rule I go by is to get 60% more memory then you need to pretty much guarantee your apps get the space they need every time. However, the denser the memory chips in your ram, the lower the frequency or timings they can perform at the same voltage, as well as being able to handle less voltage. Right now 2gig sticks are right in the middle for being able to handle the same performance as 1gig and 512mb sticks and not costing too much for denser chips. Soon this will happen with 4gig sticks. Hope this cleared things up for you, it seems alot of people don't really understand whats going on in application environments.