8gb vs 16gb?
- Thread starter GagaTroll
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Dark Lord of Tech
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If you only do light multi-tasking while gaming, 8GB should serve you well for a fair while.
Personally, I would simply get 16GB and not have to worry about RAM for the foreseeable future. Why? Because DDR4 should enter mass-production next year and that means a drastic reduction in DDR3 supply and corresponding increase on prices so getting 8GB now + upgrading to 16GB in 1-2 years will almost certainly be far more expensive than getting 16GB today. DDR3 prices have already gone up 30-50% compared to a year ago.
Buying what you need now and upgrading if you need more later is fine early in a DRAM generation where production is still ramping up and costs are going down. At the end of a DRAM product cycle like DDR3's though, prices are going up as DRAM manufacturers shift production to newer memory types so upgrading RAM on an existing system later can be a very expensive option - sometimes to the point of not making any economic sense.
Ex.: last year, I was originally thinking of upgrading my C2D to 16GB RAM but changed my mind when I saw that 16GB DDR2 cost $330 while a new i5+h77+16GB DDR3 only cost $380. It made a lot more sense to pay $50 extra for the whole platform upgrade.
Personally, I would simply get 16GB and not have to worry about RAM for the foreseeable future. Why? Because DDR4 should enter mass-production next year and that means a drastic reduction in DDR3 supply and corresponding increase on prices so getting 8GB now + upgrading to 16GB in 1-2 years will almost certainly be far more expensive than getting 16GB today. DDR3 prices have already gone up 30-50% compared to a year ago.
Buying what you need now and upgrading if you need more later is fine early in a DRAM generation where production is still ramping up and costs are going down. At the end of a DRAM product cycle like DDR3's though, prices are going up as DRAM manufacturers shift production to newer memory types so upgrading RAM on an existing system later can be a very expensive option - sometimes to the point of not making any economic sense.
Ex.: last year, I was originally thinking of upgrading my C2D to 16GB RAM but changed my mind when I saw that 16GB DDR2 cost $330 while a new i5+h77+16GB DDR3 only cost $380. It made a lot more sense to pay $50 extra for the whole platform upgrade.
- May 18, 2007
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While no single game makes much if any use of more than 8GB, some people (like me) have a whole lot of stuff open in the background at all times... and possibly more than one game in that background mix as well - in one F2P game I play, I get XP for simply sitting in-game so I tend to leave that open most of the time... ~1.5GB for the game itself and ~4GB for cached files to eliminate disk IO.
On a "normal" day (for me), I'm using 18-22GB RAM so I had to upgrade to 32GB to eliminate disk IO/swapping.
Many people here are atypically ahead on the CPU requirement curve. I'm atypically ahead on the RAM requirement curve. I used to spend over $400 on "cheap" RAM in my past builds (P3/P4/C2D) so I hardly had a second thought about paying only $200 to max out my i5 with 32GB and not worry about how much DDR3 might cost later.
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