the original inspiration for this video came when alex craftily turned the
surface laptop he'd just finished writing the review for into his daily
driver and realized that our model unfortunately only has eight gigs of RAM
with no way to upgrade it but does that matter
well the commonly held wisdom for years has been that unless you're some kind of
power user eight gigs ought to be enough for everyone well
hold on with Windows 10 and chrome devouring memory like kobayashi at a hot
dog eating contest we've been regularly seeing memory usage over 20 gigs just
from web browsing on our writing workstations
so we started an investigation ek
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so our testing rig has a core i7 7700k
a gtx 1080 ti and a one terabyte SATA
SSD then we equipped it with 4
8 16 or 32 gigabytes of RAM
at each stage we tracked page file usage with performance monitor then opened up
tasks until we noticed activity once you
reach the threshold where the system starts to swap data out of RAM and onto
the boot drive you might not necessarily see the system slow to a crawl or
anything like that but you could see a dip in performance or responsiveness if
a tab or an application that you go to access has already been paged to your
SSD or your hard drive so first up is chrome we'll be looking both at how many
chrome tabs are open when Windows starts using the page file and how many are
open when chrome eventually becomes unusable bear in mind that not all tabs
behave identically i've seen some use two gigs of RAM on their own but
we chose a mix of web pages that we feel should be representative of typical
browsing behavior with 4 gigs of RAM we actually hit the
page file with just 5 tabs open and then
after 13 chrome crashed alrighty then with 8 gigs we got to a
respectable 25 taps before any of them got swapped out and managed 40 before
the situation went totally south with 16 gigs of RAM we reached a fairly
unreasonable 80 tabs open before page filing and then chrome finally crashed
at around 180 then with 32 gigs of RAM
we got all the way to 165 tabs before paging
and frankly we didn't feel like going through the actually kind of laborious
process of opening and loading 350 to 400 web pages in chrome tabs just
to see the program fail i mean if you want that many tabs you're kind
of doing it wrong and this is coming from me
so let's move then into gaming if all you're doing is playing a game
i think you might actually be surprised by how little RAM you actually need
deus ex mankind divided for example which recommends 12 gigs of RAM
didn't suffer too badly even with only a single 4 gig stick although with that
said rise of the tomb raider had some serious issues that were only sorted out
by bumping up to 8 gigs of RAM after that though performance didn't
change for either of them when we jumped to 16 or 32 gigs
so okay then eight gigs for gamers actually maybe not i mean what if
you don't painstakingly close down all of your running applications every time
you launch steam for those folks we popped open our 10
tab test suite and an instance of discord to see if eight gigs could
handle it and surprisingly enough there was no
difference at all with the exception of rise of the tomb raider that game seems
to really love its RAM so then depending
on the game you probably won't need 16 gigs of RAM to play it
but it won't give you a ton of breathing room for the future and you might need
to limit your background tasks for the best experience so then what does anyone
need more than eight gigs of RAM for
well i would argue that any kind of workstation is going to want
at least 16 and you might be surprised to find out that even more is pretty
common for those kinds of systems alex actually has a number of excel
documents from his engineering days that believe it or not will not even open on
a computer with eight gigs of RAM and has had some simulations of fluid flow
or suspension movement that crash out even with 16 gigs of RAM
video editing can also be very demanding
but this is heavily dependent on your workload if you're cutting together
short to medium length 1080p videos 16 gigs should be plenty
but the sky is the limit here if you use tools like after effects you can expect
needing 16 to be an absolute minimum and
as the complexity of your project increases so does your RAM requirements
our latest season of scrapyard wars for example because of how darn much footage
was in the timeline immediately crashes with anything less
than 64 gigs of RAM although for more
information about how much RAM you need for video editing specifically you can
check out our video here where we tested it with up to 128 now it should be noted
that all of what i'm saying concerns system memory and not video memory which
is used for loading in 3d objects and textures for your graphics card's use
this is very important for games and also professional applications
but is probably a discussion for a different video
one i can almost guarantee will end with well it depends one interesting side
note before we wrap up is that as we moved up from four gigs of RAM our
system boot times actually got slower it was only at most a second more but this
is cool if you're aware of a Windows feature called super fetch it actually
makes sense super fetch tries to intelligently preload some programs into
RAM so that they'll launch faster when you need them so the idea is that if you
run out and buy excess memory it can still be used for something which
doesn't mean though that we're saying to do that as you might have noticed RAM
prices are out of control right now so
our recommendation for general users and gamers is eight gigs if you're looking
to scrape by and be ready to upgrade later and 16 gigs if
you want to be comfortable for a while as for the workstation users out there
well uh it depends
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