Is there really a need for 16gb RAM in a gaming system?

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nice...well most of the computers I build, I try to highlight that it comes with a ton of Ram...I guess I am thinking most people will see that and think its blazingly fast...thanks all for the answers and input
 
nice...well most of the computers I build, I try to highlight that it comes with a ton of Ram...I guess I am thinking most people will see that and think its blazingly fast...thanks all for the answers and input
Yea I tend to do that too unless it's a friend, or a friends family member then I try to steer them in the right direction. Usually I'm pretty quiet and let people load up on RAM if they want, but since the topic was brought up figured I'd give a little input with some examples to back up my claims.

I should also mention, I don't use any kind of pagefile so everything is stuck in RAM.
Here is BF3 with everything maxed out. I should mention, my res is 2048x1152 as well.

memuse2.jpg


Not even BF3 was capping 2GB for me. When I have a bit more time (crying baby that is hungry) I will play extensively in both of these games and report back mem usage.
 
do you by any chance know where online I can find different computer build specs...I am trying to update my website with more popular builds...
 
If you need more than 4GB for games then you need to cut down on the background crap. Not even Skyrim uses more than 3GB of RAM even fully modded, I would know. The only reason I have 8GB of RAM is because it came with this machine and if it wasn't for that I would be rockin 4GB just fine. We wont see games require an upward of 4GB of system RAM until after the new consoles come out and DX11 starts really being utilized. These console ports don't really do anything.

Just depends what kind of user you are. Me personally I am always in the 3GB reason on desktop, 4 to 6gb when playing games. I need my 8GB ram.
 
Just depends what kind of user you are. Me personally I am always in the 3GB reason on desktop, 4 to 6gb when playing games. I need my 8GB ram.
Well as the OP implied, we are talking gaming here. I just proved you don't need more than 8GB to game even with the pagefile off. Also why I said, the people who need more have too much crap running in the background which is why RAM requirements are going up in games. Not because they need more RAM themselves (the games).
 
4GB for most everything these days is still good, 8GB is just "future proofing" in all honesty. More than 8GB is useless in most every desktop.
 
That isn't always true, even to this day, if the processor can't even utilize all the RAM and you actually manage to use a large amount of it, you can get worse slow downs. This was particularly true back in the old days when the memory controller was present in the chipset instead of in the CPU.
 
That isn't always true, even to this day, if the processor can't even utilize all the RAM and you actually manage to use a large amount of it, you can get worse slow downs. This was particularly true back in the old days when the memory controller was present in the chipset instead of in the CPU.

+1. I tried to tell a friend this a few years ago when he was building an i7-870 build and wanted to throw some obscure amount of RAM in it. He argued and did it anyways, and his 870 build was slower than mine, and I had LESS RAM than him. As of 2 years ago, this is still relevant. Great point, Corrosive!:thumbsup:
 
There was a post between my last two, guess the user got banned or something... :-\ That or the forums screwed up again during maintenance... :-\
 
When I make my new build I will have a minimum of 8, preferably 16 to 32.
The reason for this being is I "love" to host servers. Games like Minecraft that can have a maximum of 500 players on a server at once need a lot of ram to hold those amounts. I usually just play with 2 other's than myself. The maximum I've hosted Using 2G of Ram allocated to my server is 4 including myself. On Minecraft Classic I can host 8 people with 1G of ram but no less. I once called all my PC Gaming friends and we all played on my Classic Server. I then proceeded to give them all gun rights and we just kept shooting each other for a long time... Still no issues. Remember you will need a good processor for a server also. Ram isn't enough to run a fast server. And Only top end games require descent amounts of ram these days. BF3 recommends you have 4GB of Ram to run smoothly so if you wanted to run a public server on top of that with 16 players I would say you need 16GB Ram to run smoothly without any lag. Also Servers will need enough processing speed to be able to do process players actions without anymore than 10ms of lag from the time the context reaches the server to the time just before it leaves back to the client.

That's covers the basic stuff to do with RAM and Next Gen Gaming/Hosting.
 
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