Revisiting How Much RAM Is Enough Today For Desktop Computing

jjslash writes: An article at TechSpot tests how much RAM you need for regular desktop computing and how it affects performance in apps and games. As it turns out, there's not much benefit going beyond 8 GB for regular programs, and surprisingly, 4GB still seems to be enough for gaming in most cases. Although RAM is cheap these days, and they had to go to absurdly unrealistic settings to simulate high demand for memory outside of virtualization, it's a good read to confirm our judgment calls on what is enough for most in 2015.

Comments

Schools

[ledow]

I work in schools (in the UK, that means the standard, mandatory education up to 18, nothing beyond that). Most places I have spoken to are wary of 64-bit, even, so they're still technically running on, what? 3.5Gb or thereabouts?

I have 64-bit throughout so I have 4Gb, but I've seen little reason to go past that. Pretty much the bottleneck is network, and if I get the network up to speed (not cheap), it would be server-side (disk array speed, etc.). The clients very rarely do anything that they aren't waiting for stuff from the network to complete.

Next year, I may go 8Gb in the clients but I would predict to see much huger speed increases by just going to SSD on the client (Lifespan under swap conditions? Meh, drives barely last a year or two for us anyway and then we're replacing the whole machine - overprovision and let it loose and suffer a tiny client hard drive for the sake of speed).

I really need cheap 10Gb kit, though - from server down to end-switch. Gigabit to the desktop is okay for now, but it won't be long. But RAM? Hell, 4Gb is fine for basically any business task unless it's a server. There, yes, fuck, you need as much as you can get. I just doubled all my servers RAM this summer, at great expense. But the clients are running Windows, Office, a few apps and a browser and rarely make it through the day without being logged off or shut down. And we do deal with large databases and centrally-stored stuff all the time, but that's for the server to worry about. The clients, however, need next to nothing.

Re:As much as possible

[TechyImmigrant]

The more RAM I have, the better.

Your game might have a limited memory footprint, but my entropy analysis algorithms do not.

Too much RAM is dangerous because without ECC the risk of corruption becomes very high.

For some stuff I do checksums on the bulk data to capture bit errors. It's not worth correcting for. Just re-run. It happens maybe a couple of times a year but my sample space on my current biggest machine is only 2 years. If it happened more often, ECC RAM would be more optimal. If I had the option for desktop computers I would be buying ECC ram.

When I abuse the company server farms, they do have ECC, but I'm running on desktops because people don't like it when I run my jobs on shared machines. 1 4 core, 8 thread i7 PC with 64Gig of ram runnning 24/7 can keep on going on, whereas shared servers in a rack somewhere have variable load and you have to nanny it.

I played with EC2, but it's expensive if your compute load is unbounded.

Re:As much as possible

[Penguinisto]

Try spending a quarter as much on the dell next time you compare.

I love this argument... but you forget, spending $500 on a dell laptop means you'll still fall short on specs. Like-for-like, a comparable Dell comes in at around 60-80% of a new MBP, depending on how close you want to match the specs (and where in Apple's roadmap/cycle you buy the Dell). So at the charitable 60%, you're still spending $1200 to match a brand new $2k MBP. But wait - your Dell will last maybe 3 years maximum, unless you're really careful. That MBP he mentioned has lasted 4 years and counting... most folks I know of with an MBP usually keep them for 6-8 years or so (my own is 2 years old and counting; I just barely chucked in a second HDD for mass storage, and ripped out my optical drive to make room for it since I never use the thing.)

Re:As much as possible

[Khyber]

"Music production is another case where no amount of memory is ever enough. Playing back a lot of sampled virtual instruments eats RAM like crazy."

No, that's the shit software you're using.

Old Fruity Loops 3 on a Celeron 400MHz with 384MB PC-133 SDRAM with about 128 sampled virtual instruments as solid patches, tons of fx, and not one issue.

Still running to this day just for that.