I always hear 16gb memory is an overkill - but why ?

[hotjiggy]

I wont be using to game, just lot of financial research/ investment applications and excel.

Can someone explain why its overkill to have lots of ram ?

Thanks.

[Thorsson]

Because most applications (especially games) don't use enough to make it necessary. For instance I just opened a game, a video, chrome, firefox, an excel file, a png file and a pdf file. I'd still only used 15% of my 16Gb. I got 16Gb just in case, because the extra cash meant nothing to me.

[kompukare]

I have an alternative explanation:

RAM prices are basic supply and demand. Since not many people actually need 16GB the less people buy them, the less RAM gets sold and the manufacturer cannot raise prices.

In other words: if you don't buy 16GB, I can afford to. If everyone buys 16GB then I can only afford 4GB!

[mikeo01]

Really depends on the hungry applications you may use, how much it needs. I use 8GB and right now it's topped at 25%. I run virtualbox for my studies with 4 machines, and that doesn't even eat up 8GB

If you will be running a multi-user system 16GB may be nice to have, but for a single user with simple excel and office tools you may fine 4GB to be ample. I always recommend 8GB just because 4GB x2 kits are just as cheap now.

[GeorgeStorm]

I think the main reason it's said to be overkill is because for most people it is.
You simply won't see a benefit going from 8gb to 16gb since the software most people use on their computers won't use it.

I have 8gb and am currently using around 4gb of it, with a browser with a couple of tabs, media player classic, some coding stuff open and skype, steam, zune etc.
I have seen it be above 7gb usage, although that's only when I've got a lot of stuff going on (normally when I have 40+ tabs etc).
Unless you know your software performs better with the extra RAM, I wouldn't bother

[jim]

For most things on the PC, higher specs mean quicker.

Problem is, quantity of RAM isn't like that. You either use it, or you don't. If your PC needs 3.7GB of RAM at peak, then 4GB of RAM will be quick. 3GB of RAM would be slow, because 0.7GB won't fit on there, and will have to either be not stored at all, or moved to the page file.

Supposing you had 8GB of RAM, well it'd still use 3.7GB, but this time with 4.3GB free instead of 0.3GB. And if you had 96GB of RAM, you would have 92.3GB free. That "free" RAM does absolutely nothing (well, apart from waste electricity). Your PC can't use it for anything worthwhile.

In Windows 7, your PC will attempt to use the spare space for useful things, preloading items that it thinks you might need in a while. But there's a limit to that, it won't go on loading forever. Right now, out of 8GB RAM, I have 500MB doing absolutely nothing - even the preloading tool won't fill that bit.

[hotjiggy]

Cheers for this guys - but wasn't someone saying 8 gb was overkill only a few years back ?

[Agent]

Cheers for this guys - but wasn't someone saying 8 gb was overkill only a few years back ?

Yes - but because it would have been an overkill a few years back

If you want to go down that road - get a server motherboard and put 128 gig in it, because I'm sure it won't be an overkill....one day

[badass]

16GB isn't overkill. I've got 32GB and the highest usage I've seen is 95%. But I need that for what I do.
2GB is overkill for a bit of word processing.
I have 5 servers at my work with 288GB of RAM each. In an ideal world, we would have more than twice as much.
It depends on what you use your computer for.

[hotjiggy]

16GB isn't overkill. I've got 32GB and the highest usage I've seen is 95%. But I need that for what I do.
2GB is overkill for a bit of word processing.
I have 5 servers at my work with 288GB of RAM each. In an ideal world, we would have more than twice as much.
It depends on what you use your computer for.

will be using for lots of data with excel and other financial research applications. thanks.

[Agent]

will be using for lots of data with excel and other financial research applications. thanks.

That's still too vague. You could be doing basic cell calculations or deep interconnecting workbook formula.

What's your current spec and how does it hold up with what you do? Do you regularly hit a memory wall with it, or is a CPU bound? What type of calculations are you doing? Simple sums, or large matrices containing large, complex data?

It's a bit like asking for the spec of a gaming machine, only to find out they just want to play solitaire.

[OXO]

Make a "Ramdisk" ... ultra fast loading.

You could try "AMD Radeon™ RAMDisk" - I hope to use something similar for caching flight sim terrain data.

[OXO]

Or the free opensource equivalent: ImDisk .............................. (unlimited size)

"ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver" http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk

http://www.overclock.net/t/1086220/i...ze-limitations

Best quote:

With the price of RAM, I don't think it's crazy to max it out anymore, especially with those results.
jellis142

Setup guide here (hope linking to other forums isn't against the rules)
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=356046

[GeorgeStorm]

Maybe 8gb isn't enough....

[directhex]

Most people are still running 32-bit apps, which are limited to 2GB each.

[scaryjim]

I've seen computers approach 4GB of physical memory usage a couple of times - I had a laptop I used for dev work once that used to chew through stupid amounts of RAM when optimzing my .NET GAC (although after I reinstalled the OS it settled down to something more reasonable); there was a memory leak in an older version of Chrome that doubled memory usage when you started a laptop from hibernate (saw Chrome on it's own peak at around 3.5GB for that one ). I saw a computer hit more than 16GB once: an analysis workstation at my previous unit, when sorting a 2 million record SPSS file, hit ~ 18GB.

My work laptop is currently at around 3.5GB, with firefox and Chrome between them responsible for over 1GB of that. I'm pretty sure they don't need to be using that much memory though - browsers seem to have got a lot more memory intensive in the last year or so (possibly as 4GB+ and 64bit OSes have become more prevalent).

I'm sure we're not more than a couple of years off 4GB not being considered enough memory (for a Windows machine, at least), but it depends so much on usage patterns it's unreal (my old HTPC, for instance, was running 32bit Win 7 on 2GB and had no issues whatsoever).