8GB or 16GB

[Greecean]

I say go 16gb of ram, if you can find a good price Also saves you from ordering and waiting if you get 8gb and require more later

+1

if you know your going to get 16gb eventually - just get it all now - i wouldnt recommend trying to match brand and model at a later date

[mbkuk1]

Given that he specifically states modelling and Photoshop, those are two areas which will eat any RAM you give it. It's not hard to hit max out 16Gig when working with todays game assets (more so when you load an engine too!)

Miss read the question sorry.... 16 would be best if not more

[stucathome]

You can feel the difference in stability and smoothness between 8GB & 16GB in Win 7 ultimate. Prices of DDR3 are so low it's a no-brainer

[kalniel]

You can feel the difference in stability and smoothness between 8GB & 16GB in Win 7 ultimate.

I don't think you can - did someone do a test that showed otherwise?

[Newblet]

It depends on how often you're going to be doing memory intensive tasks like video rendering (I think that's memory intensive anyway). You should decide on every component with 8 GB, then upgrade to 16 GB if you have money left over and want to spend it!

[VulgarDisplay88]

+1 for 16GB especially if you use CS5 and do 3D rendering

[sonico11]

The issue with this is that they are technically BOTH overkill - you will find it very hard to have so many active applications and processes stored in memory concurrently - 8GB is safe value to go for for some future-proofing as software developing becomes more memory-bound. 16GB is extremely overkill so unless you can get some decent clocked sticks for extremely cheap, it isn't really worth it yet. I have 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 memory, but only because I could swoop the 4x4GB set for ~£60 which was an incredible bargain. Having this amount, I rarely ever go above 25% memory usage on my machine and I have a ton of background processes running including McAfee Security Suite which sucks memory, as well as Skype, Google Chrome (many Flash Player instances runnning simulataneously) and so on.

So, in other words (tl;dr), go for 8GB for future-proofing unless you can find 16GB for an incredibly cheap price.
Hope this helps

Edit: Forgot to mention, if you plan on doing Media oriented things, then more memory is good to a certain extent, before your PC forces CPU-bound rendering and processing so if going for 16GB in this context, ensure both your GPU and CPU combination (especially CPU) is nice and quick for your rendering.

[ZaO]

I'm pretty sure there's no games going that would benefit from more than 8GB of ram but for the stuff you wanna do I think the 16GB will probably be worth it.

[MoneyShot239]

A couple of weeks ago I was working on a 3GB Photoshop file. It failed so hard with the 4GB so I had to upgrade to 8GB, but I never really maxed it out. The only thing that could do that is if you are doing videos. Dominator is £30 atm btw

[Toothy1911]

If you're getting some low priced ram. Why not go 16GB. Dont have to worry about it for years potentially. And for hardly cost any extra

[Agent]

This thread is over 4 months old and we still have people posting simple answers to get to 20 posts.

If you're posting here to reach to 20 posts, ask yourself if you're adding anything to the discussion. If not, then perhaps try and find another newer thread you can help in?