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- Apr 10, 2011
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- Scottsdale, Arizona
Does it make your pc run smoother perform better? gaming better? I have my pc for gaming mostly, i am curious what does a lot of ram do for me? I'd apprecaite the answers.
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What is the benefit of having a lot of ram?
- Thread starter McMoose
- Start date
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2011
For you (mainly gaming), more than 8GB is a waste.
Large amount of ram is useful for heavy video/photo/music editing and if for people running virtual machines.
Most games are still designed for 32bits OS and do no use more than 2GB (game application only).
So, you're just ok with 4GB, and 8GB seems to be the sweet spot if you want a bit of headroom.
Large amount of ram is useful for heavy video/photo/music editing and if for people running virtual machines.
Most games are still designed for 32bits OS and do no use more than 2GB (game application only).
So, you're just ok with 4GB, and 8GB seems to be the sweet spot if you want a bit of headroom.
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2013
Having more ram up to a certain point will help your computer perform better. The average user will not see any performance benefits above 8 or 12GB. The power or performance user will not see any performance benefits above 16 or 24GB. I personally have 64GB of RAM because I keep a 48GB RAM drive for a whole bunch of things including scratch disk, temporary files, cache, sometimes steam games, etc. It is of course very very quick but you lose the contents of the drive when you shut down your computer or in the event of a power outage.
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2004
I use a 12 GB tmpfs for compilation space in Gentoo. Doing that in RAM is significantly faster than even an SSD. I also have tmpfs totalling several GB for /tmp, /var/tmp, and my Firefox cache directory. I often see over 8 GB RAM being used for general caching. Sadly, I've only ever seen around 3 GB used for caching in Windows.
OP
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2011
- Location
- Scottsdale, Arizona
- Thread Starter
- #5
I see I only ask because I am planning on upgrading my pc I am getting a 770 or 780 gpu considering a ssd then thought of ram but wasn't sure if it was a necessary upgrade.
The short answer is this: there is no benefit to having more RAM than you need. Having less RAM than you need is a disaster.
Basically, the moment you run out of RAM, your processor has to start swapping things in and out of memory by sticking them back on the hard drive. Not only is the hard drive much, much slower (even an SSD), but the swapping takes time as well. Think of it as RAM being the size of the desk in front of you and every time you run out of space on it, you have to take some of the papers on it to the filing cabinet in the next room. And then when you need them again, you have to take something else that's currently on your desk and put it in the filing cabinet so you have room to get the first thing back again.
That's a simplified version. Modern OS's also use RAM for caching things from disk to save reads and as a buffer for writes. This means that excess RAM is not a complete dead weight, but the benefit of this is not usually that large and there are limits even to how much it is useful to cache.
8GB is more than most people will ever use. People doing heavier image manipulation or running a VM might want 12GB. Beyond that, you're looking at specialist needs. People rendering complex 3D scenes (note, not games, graphics work), people doing less common database work like me or those running multiple VMs. That sort of thing.
Basically, the moment you run out of RAM, your processor has to start swapping things in and out of memory by sticking them back on the hard drive. Not only is the hard drive much, much slower (even an SSD), but the swapping takes time as well. Think of it as RAM being the size of the desk in front of you and every time you run out of space on it, you have to take some of the papers on it to the filing cabinet in the next room. And then when you need them again, you have to take something else that's currently on your desk and put it in the filing cabinet so you have room to get the first thing back again.
That's a simplified version. Modern OS's also use RAM for caching things from disk to save reads and as a buffer for writes. This means that excess RAM is not a complete dead weight, but the benefit of this is not usually that large and there are limits even to how much it is useful to cache.
8GB is more than most people will ever use. People doing heavier image manipulation or running a VM might want 12GB. Beyond that, you're looking at specialist needs. People rendering complex 3D scenes (note, not games, graphics work), people doing less common database work like me or those running multiple VMs. That sort of thing.
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