What is the point of buying 16 gb memory?

[berkkarabacak]

Very often i see high end gaming pc's have 16 gb memory.But what is the point of it since even most advanced games do not use more than 2 gb of memory.Is it even make a difference in any program, to use 4 gb or 16 gb of memory?

 

[blastingcap]

Multitasking.

If you leave a lot of browser windows open or some other memory-hungry apps, that can impact the RAM left over for games. 8GB+ is safer (and may also improve minimum fps somewhat) if you multitask a lot. If you are good about closing everything down before starting up games, though, you can get by with 2GB total system RAM in most games and not lose much in average framerate, though minimums may take a slight hit (~5-10%).

For similar reasons, it's better to have a tri-core or at least a dual core with hyperthreading, even if a game uses just 2 threads.

core1 - game
core2 - game
core 3+ - non-game

 

[Red Squirrel]

More stuff open at once, VMs, games etc...

 

[Coup27]

There's more to computers than playing games.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

The question is, why not given that DDR3 is dirt cheap?
The only reasons I'm sticking with 4x 2GB are for tripple channel BW (EX58-UD3R) and that OCZ gave me some sweet a*s sticks for a warranty claim :
http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-ddr3-pc3-12800-reaper-hpc-eol.html

 

[turn_pike]

I switch games a lot.
Typical session would look like this :
Play Victoria2. Got bored.
Alt-tab to Windows. Start Crysis2.

If I had more than 8GB RAM, I probably would have a lot more games open concurrently just because its so convenient to switch around instead of having to wait for them to load. The games themselves are not that memory hungry, however you add Firefox and Chrome with 30+ tabs open, Eclipse, Xchat, Torrent client, Songbird media player, Skype, Anti Virus, Firewall, Apache,Postgresql, etc. running at the same time and you suddenly looking at 7GB+ memory used.

Unfortunately some games suck CPU time even though they are running in background.

 

[hclarkjr]

what is the point of buying 16 gb memory?

because i could afford it

 

[Insomniator]

Its just cheap, and I remember DDR2 prices skyrocketing back in the day. When 16GB of high quality DDR3 became available for like... 60 bucks or whatever I paid I just had to get it.

 

[berkkarabacak]

Thanks for all these great answers (except hclarkjr).I also know that they are not expensive,but let's not forget that they are not that cheap for everyone.They can get quite expensive (at least for me) if you are buying very high mhz ram

 

[Puppies04]

Very often i see high end gaming pc's have 16 gb memory.But what is the point of it since even most advanced games do not use more than 2 gb of memory.Is it even make a difference in any program, to use 4 gb or 16 gb of memory?

They have 16GB because it sounds cool, pure E-peen that just about sums it up. You could argue that someone looking at the build might actually need a large amount of RAM because they intend to do other tasks than just game but 99% of the time the answer is just because.

As for the previous poster who was talking about having 10 programs, 30 browser tabs and multiple games open all at the same time how do you not notice slowdown while playing something like crysis 2 under these circumstances? Hell I have been know to leave a mincraft server running in the background for other people to play on while I play another game but i'm certain to turn it straight off the minute it is finished with.

 

[exdeath]

The question is why not? Because 8 GB costs $80 and 16 GB costs $81, more or less.

 

[thestrangebrew1]

I've got 16gb in my rig but only after I realized 8gb wasn't enough when I was streaming music, transcoding a BD movie with handbrake, ripping a different BD to my hdd and playing BF3. When I had 8gb, I would get some memory error saying I was almost maxed out so I threw more in and haven't had any issues since. It's kinda overkill though because I don't do all those things at once during normal use. Just kinda nice to know that I CAN and not have to worry about it now.

 

[Zargon]

with xfire 69xx cards I would see ~6-7gb of usage playing bf3

fresh after a reboot. that means if my rigs been on for a few weeks and Ive done tons of random crap I am really pushing my mem limits, and it was 45 bucks for the 4x2gb kit...

 

[blastingcap]

Win 7 "reserves" memory even if it's not using it. Do not look at your RAM usage using the usual tools. These reports of "zomg, Win 7 is using 99% of my RAM" have been around since the launch of Win 7, yet people are still jumping to the same conclusion even in 2012.

 

[Remobz]

I switch games a lot.
Typical session would look like this :
Play Victoria2. Got bored.
Alt-tab to Windows. Start Crysis2.

If I had more than 8GB RAM, I probably would have a lot more games open concurrently just because its so convenient to switch around instead of having to wait for them to load. The games themselves are not that memory hungry, however you add Firefox and Chrome with 30+ tabs open, Eclipse, Xchat, Torrent client, Songbird media player, Skype, Anti Virus, Firewall, Apache,Postgresql, etc. running at the same time and you suddenly looking at 7GB+ memory used.

Unfortunately some games suck CPU time even though they are running in background.

Call me weird but when I play a game I actually just play the game instead of doing a zillion things at the same time.

 

[Skott]

If you are doing rendering, animation, photo editing, etc., more ram is also helpful. Speeds up the process.

 

[jhansman]

because i could afford it

This. And, I no longer have to think about exhausting it while doing multiple tasks, some quite RAM hungry.

 

[cmdrdredd]

If the PC is Gaming+other then I see the reason. Just games and the usual WP, Browsing, movies/video/Music/email etc. Then 8GB is plenty.

 

[PhoenixEnigma]

For gaming alone, 16GB really isn't needed, though I suppose there's an argument for setting 10GB aside as a RAM disk.

As others have mentioned, though, there are other things that will benefit greatly from the extra memory (image editing jumps to my mind), and multitasking can inflict a death of a thousand allocations to a low-memory system.

 

[tweakboy]

You guys are all talking about games. For that all you need is 4GB to 6GB of RAM.

I use Sonar X1 and that is where even 16GB is no where enough for my projects.

If I preload all samples and what not, sorta like a template I would neeed at least 64GB. For now I cant do a template like that cuz I have gotten the out of memory pop up on some of my projects,,, anyhow a DAW or Video Editor will actually use up that 16GB , which is not enough for me. 64GB RAM sounds juicy! Hopefully Haswell will allow for 64GB on their desktop mobo.. thx gl,

 

[HutchinsonJC]

I've never understood the need for someone to mention the fact that you don't need 16GB of RAM to game, either in response to a RAM question or in the question itself.

I'd wager a guess that 90%+ of the folks who have 16GB of RAM, or are looking to purchase 16GB of RAM, know they don't need all that RAM just to game. Sure, a lot want it just to say that they have it, some want it for the idea of "future proofing", some want it just because they multi-task.

I kind of like being able to play a game, have a few news articles or tech reviews open in my favorite web browser that I can read on down time in the game ('cause someone went AFK), another couple of tabs for email or <insert chat or other social website here>, ventrilo/skype to chat with friends, some kind of video encoder running at full blast on insane settings (and still finish encoding a 2hr source in less than 2hrs), all while not running a page file, and all while having zero fear of cache thrashing or other misc slow downs due to a lack of RAM, and all while having free reign of opening a second client of the same game to dual box someone's toon for a few mins or being able to open most any other application, or several, for that matter. Then there's always F@H that once up and running, most people don't shut off, even while gaming, or encoding a video.

Oh, and some people buy the amounts of RAM they do because it's cheap... and why not?

 

[ky54]

Buy RAM now or pay the price later. As the price of SSD and mech HD's drop the more the price of RAM will increase. Of course there's no correlation but it will happen.

 

[MoInSTL]

I made a mistake when I bought RAM for my old Athlon X2-3800+. I thought that 2GB was enough and when I finally got around to buying more, of course the older DDR was much more expensive. Didn't want to make the same mistake this time and RAM is cheap right now.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Wish I bought 12GB memory when I got my current system. Games, VMs, various programs & browsers, F@H. I often run into 5GB or more.

 

[mv2devnull]

But what is the point of it since even most advanced games do not use more than 2 gb of memory.

Not quite true. Windows gives a 32-bit program a 2 GiB memory address space. There is a "large address aware flag", that can force the Windows to give 3 or 4 GiB address space to a program, but not all programs are stable with that. Therefore, the memory usage limit is not due to "advanced games" not being "advanced".

64-bit programs can use more memory by default. Much more. Obviously, publishing a game as 64-bit-only would not be good marketing and maintaining both 32-bit and 64-bit versions is overhead. You should notice that the video editing business does push the 64-bit, because in that field the benefits are very clear.

As said by others, "caching" is the keyword. Use of cache is an optimization. Loading from HDD is slow compared to loading from RAM. With enough RAM, one can cache the data in RAM. Load once from HDD, read many from RAM. The 32-bit games obviously cannot cache themselves all the data (the do some), but current Windows does cache too. While Windows cache is not as smart and specific as a program would be, it is still quite smart and the memory gets used.