What is the point of buying 16 gb memory?

[KentState]

I like being able to run a VM environment in the background while playing a game and have a browser open. Yes, I can shut everything down, but it's a pain to pause that many machines after carefully shut down any active processes.

 

[thefordmccord]

I'm still rocking 6 gigs in my desktop. It seems to be a sweet spot for what I do with my computer. I have been thinking about picking up another 6 gig kit for shiggles.

 

[davel]

I bought 16 GB for several reasons but what really convinced me was seeing Max Payne 3 recommend 16 GB.

I know people keep saying games don't need more then 8, but that is right now, that is going to change as Max Payne 3 is a perfect example.

I mean it is so cheap it not really a big deal.

 

[gmaster456]

Because some people need it. I have run into the 8gb barrier quite a few times myself. It depends on what you do. For gaming, you don't really need much more than 4gb. For for video editing, photo editing, CAD, etc. ram is certainly helpful and in most cases, a necessity.

 

[bryanW1995]

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

I would much rather have 16gb of 1333 ram than 8 gb of 1866.

 

[XtremeCuztoms]

man, i guess 4gb isn't the norm anymore. guess i need 32gb just so i can play farmville.

 

[gmaster456]

man, i guess 4gb isn't the norm anymore. guess i need 32gb just so i can play farmville.

Only if you want to keep up with the Jones'. And people still play that game?

 

[taltamir]

Why 16GB? Do you not realize how little 16GB is if you are trying to render an animation, create a complex photoshop image, or run a database?
16GB is chump change. Businesses get special mobos to have hundreds of GB of RAM.

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.

whoa there... the LAA flag was created out of FEAR that programs MIGHT become unstable if given that much ram (and I don't see how that could possibly be)... but as far as I know that was unsubstantiated and there has never been a program which actually get a bug related to LAA being turned on.

On the other hand, many programs crash due to memory leaks and bad memory management and it can be alleviated with LAA. (and by programs I mean video games)

 

[Eug]

4 GB was definitely not enough for me. I figured another 4 GB would likely be fine most of the time... so I bought 8 GB more just to be safe, for a total of 12.

It turns out 12 seems like the real-world sweet spot for me, but if memory were as cheap then as it is now, I would have simply bought 16 GB more, for a total of 20 GB, just for the rare times I might actually need more than 12 GB.

For those of you getting a new higher end machine now, and you're doing more than just gaming and surfing AnandTech on it, I think 16 GB is appropriate. If you have even higher end needs, then 16 GB minimum is probably mandatory, with consideration for 32 GB.

 

[BFG10K]

the LAA flag was created out of FEAR that programs MIGHT become unstable if given that much ram (and I don't see how that could possibly be)...

Programs that use pointer arithmetic based on assumptions of the greatest memory size returned to them can start referencing invalid or incorrect memory locations.

I personally haven’t seen the flag cause any problems, but I’ve seen programs have issues in 64 bit systems with more than 4GB RAM (e.g. Vampire Bloodlines, Halo 1), which is a similar problem.

but as far as I know that was unsubstantiated and there has never been a program which actually get a bug related to LAA being turned on.

Some 32 bit device drivers can’t handle the extra memory and behave incorrectly, which is why Microsoft kept the artificial memory limitation on 32 bit Windows.

64 bit drivers have to be rewritten anyway, and also won’t get WHQL if they don’t work properly with lots of RAM.

 

[taltamir]

Programs that use pointer arithmetic based on assumptions of the greatest memory size returned to them can start referencing invalid or incorrect memory locations.

Other way around. I saw this happen in early versions of a game called spellforce the order of dawn. You had to increase pagefile enough so that the game is corrupting the pagefile rather then your RAM to avoid crashes due to it doing what you said.
A program has no business in referencing "invalid" memory location, ever. And if it does it may risk memory corruption. (My second program ever written did something like that, which I sadly did not save so I am not sure exactly what it did but it was a ~30 line C++ proggy that used pointers insanely and would blue screen vista or XP immediately as it was ran)

So, if a program is doing something disasterous like that, LAA might actually prevent bluescreens.

Some 32 bit device drivers can’t handle the extra memory and behave incorrectly, which is why Microsoft kept the artificial memory limitation on 32 bit Windows.

64 bit drivers have to be rewritten anyway, and also won’t get WHQL if they don’t work properly with lots of RAM.

Interesting. But they kept the limit for 64bit as well (at least, its on by default unless explicitly turned off by the program) and those had to be rewritten...

 

[poofyhairguy]

I am big on 2 gig per core. So for today and for the last four years I have been sitting at 8 gigs in my quad core. When I finally buy that octocore machine that I thought I would have been able to buy by now, it will have 16GB.

Get off your ass Intel and give my consumer octocore!!

 

[bleucharm28]

So what is difference in mhz?
Example: 8g (2x4) with 2600mhz vs 8g (2x4) with 1600mhz? Is it something i can see from my own eyes or only through benchmark programs? How big of an impact does have with 2600mhz over 1600mhz. The 1600mhz rams are usually cheaper.

 

[ShintaiDK]

So what is difference in mhz?
Example: 8g (2x4) with 2600mhz vs 8g (2x4) with 1600mhz? Is it something i can see from my own eyes or only through benchmark programs? How big of an impact does have with 2600mhz over 1600mhz. The 1600mhz rams are usually cheaper.

Absolutely nothing.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4503/sandy-bridge-memory-scaling-choosing-the-best-ddr3

 

[taltamir]

Absolutely nothing.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4503/sandy-bridge-memory-scaling-choosing-the-best-ddr3

from that article:

The overall score, which is heavily based on the graphics tests, shows a mere ~1% change across the board. When you get to the graphics test, you can see that the faster memory makes absolutely no difference at all. It's not until we get to the physics test where we see some improvement from increasing the memory speed. We get performance boost of up to 11% when going from DDR3-133 to DDR3-2133. The combined test entails the rendering of a 3D scene with the GPU while performing physics tasks on the CPU. Here again, were see a very small 2% increase in performance from the slowest to the fastest.

Note that they made a typo, its DDR3-1333 that is the slowest they tested, not 133. (133 was pre DDR)

 

[chrisram]

I have 8gb and have shut off swap file, was eating too much space on ssd. Games, photoshop cs4, dreamweaver, acrobat, nothing is complaining about not having a swap file and it is fast!!

 

[Wall Street]

I have alt-tabed games without hanging the system which is nice, but also, Windows 7 SuperFetch also gives some apps SSD like loading times, especially if you sleep the computer instead of using shut down.