16 or 32 GB RAM?

[olds]

This is for work. We have to buy specific laptops from a list. That list then has upgrades and accessories that one can get. We keep our laptop for between 3 and 5 years.
I am going to go with an i7 and an SSD HDD,
I was surprised 32 GB RAM was an option. Is there any legitimate reason to go with 32 GB over 16 GB?
Laptops are mostly used for office software, email, etc. A couple of us do use Photoshop and Adobe Premier (CS6).
I don't want to waste money but they may have to last 5 years.
TIA

 

[pcslookout]

32 GB just to be sure.

 

[VirtualLarry]

5 years? That's a long time for tech. Better max that sucker out, for longevity.

 

[ericlp]

How easy is it to upgrade the ram? A ram access door on the bottom of the laptop?

I doubt going over 8GB is worth it, for just email and surfing the web. What's most important is getting faster ram if you ask me. Yank that ram out and get with a name brand that will max out what a 7 gen intel chip will pump out...

How much will it cost to upgrade? Right now you can buy some high performance ram for 32G for 160 bucks

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01DGOF3E4/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1

You could pop out the old sticks and upgrade other laptops depending how they are configured.

I always recommend buying the higher performance ram if you laptop will support it. Also, don't forget, this ram might cost less than 100 bucks in a few years from now, and you might not need the upgrade today.

 

[olds]

I don't have to access anything to upgrade, I'd order them that way. And 8 GB doesn't cut it. With ZENworks and Novel running in the background, the current laptops, with 5400 RPM HDDs, are not even what I'd consider usable. You literally have to wait for one task to complete before starting another. And when you first boot up and ZENworks is looking for updates, it's unusable altogether.

 

[ericlp]

Just so you know, some laptop manufactures don't put the best RAM in them. So, your losing out on performance for "ordering" them that way, when you can get quality high speed ram for cheaper or the same price of "ordered ram"... It's up to you, it only takes a few minutes to install RAM. Note: even upgrading RAM, won't necessarily make it faster, since.... some machines depending on it's configuration, will run at the slowest installed module, so it's better to buy in kits.

Good Luck with it!

 

[MarkizSchnitzel]

I seriously doubt that for office work 3-5 years for now, one will need more than 16GB RAM..

We use CADs, VM and Office, with dozens of other smaller applications (like notepad++, greenshot and such) with 8GB machines (dekstop) without a hint of any problem.

But for PS, no idea. I only ever use paint.net for very basic stuff. Though I find it hard to imagine what kind of files and filters would you have to be working with to fill out more than 16GB RAM?

 

[olds]

Just so you know, some laptop manufactures don't put the best RAM in them. So, your losing out on performance for "ordering" them that way, when you can get quality high speed ram for cheaper or the same price of "ordered ram"... It's up to you, it only takes a few minutes to install RAM. Note: even upgrading RAM, won't necessarily make it faster, since.... some machines depending on it's configuration, will run at the slowest installed module, so it's better to buy in kits.

Good Luck with it!

I don't disagree, it's for work and it's about 10 more steps and a month of approvals to do it that way. It's way easier to just order what's on the contract.
Thanks though.

I seriously doubt that for office work 3-5 years for now, one will need more than 16GB RAM..

We use CADs, VM and Office, with dozens of other smaller applications (like notepad++, greenshot and such) with 8GB machines (dekstop) without a hint of any problem.

But for PS, no idea. I only ever use paint.net for very basic stuff. Though I find it hard to imagine what kind of files and filters would you have to be working with to fill out more than 16GB RAM?

Hence my question. But.... do you run ZENWorks and Novel?

 

[HitAnyKey]

If you do photoshop 32Gb is a must...

Pretty much this is one of the best arguments for more memory. Time is money and faster saves time its that simple. To be honest I can't see any reason to turn down 32GB RAM if given the option. A more silly reason is say one of the memory sticks goes bad, you still have 16GB. Don't use that excuse with your boss ;-)

 

[zCypher]

There isn't really any downside to having more RAM. When I put together my NUC, I opted for maxing it out with 32GB just because I could. I probably will never, or very rarely make use of it. But it's there if I need it which is the point. My previous system was 16GB, and I did just fine with that - having that headroom for VMs was nice. I do use Lightroom and Photoshop but I'm probably a lighter user than anyone that uses PS for serious pro work.

Get the 32GB unless it's too cost prohibitive. Usually this is a trivial thing to upgrade in the future. So RAM is really one of those things best purchased when prices are low, if circumstances allow. The 5 years part doesn't necessarily concern me. My last system lasted longer than that without giving me the upgrade itch. It's really about whether or not the intended use case is likely to surpass any limitations of 16GB. For most users, that's absolutely a no.

For heavy PS use, 32GB might be a good choice.

 

[giantpandaman2]

There isn't really any downside to having more RAM.

Actually you do get less battery life with more RAM because the chips need current and the CPU overhead from managing the expanded memory. Whether that lessened battery life is substantial enough to make any difference to the user is debatable, however.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

5 years? That's a long time for tech. Better max that sucker out, for longevity.

5 years is a typical replacement interval for most people. You're the one replacing your rig every 6 months.

 

[you2]

I would go with 16GB; the primary reason being that ram sucks power and this is a laptop. For years I ran my gaming pc at 8GB (last 8 years) and only upgraded it to 16GB (2 months ago) because newer games like doom pushed it over the limit (I don't like paging to ssd; so no page file). My server has 32GB but that is because I never reboot it and use it for browsing (yea between zfs caching and memory leaks in chrome - which are mostly gone in 16.04 I was pushing the limit at 32GB).
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If i was willing to restart the browser once a week 16GB would have been amble.
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I will admit that if you are (or will be) going with the newer cameras 40+Mp then 32GB might be helpful with photo editing (not sure how in-efficient photoshop is but i suspect it is a dog). anyway if it were myself I would not use photoshop on a laptop and would go with 8GB to max out battery life but if I was my sister or brother (both of them have their lives revolve around laptops) the story would be different.

 

[sdifox]

32 for ps users, rest 16. tricky part is ordering 1 stick for the 16gb ones so you can slap in another 16 later. unless you guys are buying the glues together machines like surface book.

 

[ch33zw1z]

32GB

 

[dawza]

8GB today is the minimum for "just" office work, IMO. For inexplicable reasons, our standard configuration is a base model Latitude E5XXX or E7XXX, which means 4 or 8GB of memory, respectively. Performance is tolerable only due to SSDs, although the 4GB setups become painful quite quickly.

Most employees use only 32-bit Office, and Excel plus web app usage tend to be the most intensive resource hogs. I requested an upgrade to 12GB almost immediately, since I do quite a bit of data stuff, and my language of choice requires data to be held in-memory. I felt, and clearly was hamstrung by 4GB. 12 was fine, and I pushed to 16 for a bit more ceiling.

What I am saying is that I imagine standard Office/web app usage will be fine even in 5 years with 16GB, and that quantity is almost certainly overkill today. That being said, you are much better qualified to assess your user's needs, and I agree that when it comes to Adobe desktop applications, you can never have too much memory. Do the majority of your users run ZENWorks? And/or run VMs? If not, is this likely to change in 3-5 years? Do you anticipate compute and/or GPU requirements scaling up/becoming a bottleneck in 3-5 years?

If it helps, I would have gone with SSD and 8GB vs HDD and 16GB. I can chunk up my work to get around memory constraints, or use AWS clusters. I cannot do much to really optimize application launch times or I/O. And for VMs, I only have so much high-performance I/O and RAM, although on notebooks, I generally only have 2 physical cores to work with.