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Revisiting How Much RAM Is Enough Today For Desktop Computing

Posted by Soulskill on from the 64GB-ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody dept.

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.

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  1. Schools by ledow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.