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the original inspiration for this video came when alex craftily turned the

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surface laptop he'd just finished writing the review for into his daily

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driver and realized that our model unfortunately only has eight gigs of RAM

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with no way to upgrade it but does that matter

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well the commonly held wisdom for years has been that unless you're some kind of

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power user eight gigs ought to be enough for everyone well

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hold on with Windows 10 and chrome devouring memory like kobayashi at a hot

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dog eating contest we've been regularly seeing memory usage over 20 gigs just

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from web browsing on our writing workstations

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so we started an investigation ek

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waterblox's mlc phoenix lineup is designed around quick disconnect

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couplings and brings a modular approach to connecting and expanding your water

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cooling loop learn more at the link below

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so our testing rig has a core i7 7700k

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a gtx 1080 ti and a one terabyte SATA

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SSD then we equipped it with 4

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8 16 or 32 gigabytes of RAM

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at each stage we tracked page file usage with performance monitor then opened up

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tasks until we noticed activity once you

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reach the threshold where the system starts to swap data out of RAM and onto

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the boot drive you might not necessarily see the system slow to a crawl or

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anything like that but you could see a dip in performance or responsiveness if

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a tab or an application that you go to access has already been paged to your

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SSD or your hard drive so first up is chrome we'll be looking both at how many

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chrome tabs are open when Windows starts using the page file and how many are

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open when chrome eventually becomes unusable bear in mind that not all tabs

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behave identically i've seen some use two gigs of RAM on their own but

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we chose a mix of web pages that we feel should be representative of typical

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browsing behavior with 4 gigs of RAM we actually hit the

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page file with just 5 tabs open and then

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after 13 chrome crashed alrighty then with 8 gigs we got to a

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respectable 25 taps before any of them got swapped out and managed 40 before

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the situation went totally south with 16 gigs of RAM we reached a fairly

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unreasonable 80 tabs open before page filing and then chrome finally crashed

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at around 180 then with 32 gigs of RAM

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we got all the way to 165 tabs before paging

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and frankly we didn't feel like going through the actually kind of laborious

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process of opening and loading 350 to 400 web pages in chrome tabs just

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to see the program fail i mean if you want that many tabs you're kind

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of doing it wrong and this is coming from me

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so let's move then into gaming if all you're doing is playing a game

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i think you might actually be surprised by how little RAM you actually need

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deus ex mankind divided for example which recommends 12 gigs of RAM

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didn't suffer too badly even with only a single 4 gig stick although with that

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said rise of the tomb raider had some serious issues that were only sorted out

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by bumping up to 8 gigs of RAM after that though performance didn't

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change for either of them when we jumped to 16 or 32 gigs

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so okay then eight gigs for gamers actually maybe not i mean what if

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you don't painstakingly close down all of your running applications every time

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you launch steam for those folks we popped open our 10

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tab test suite and an instance of discord to see if eight gigs could

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handle it and surprisingly enough there was no

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difference at all with the exception of rise of the tomb raider that game seems

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to really love its RAM so then depending

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on the game you probably won't need 16 gigs of RAM to play it

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but it won't give you a ton of breathing room for the future and you might need

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to limit your background tasks for the best experience so then what does anyone

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need more than eight gigs of RAM for

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well i would argue that any kind of workstation is going to want

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at least 16 and you might be surprised to find out that even more is pretty

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common for those kinds of systems alex actually has a number of excel

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documents from his engineering days that believe it or not will not even open on

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a computer with eight gigs of RAM and has had some simulations of fluid flow

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or suspension movement that crash out even with 16 gigs of RAM

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video editing can also be very demanding

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but this is heavily dependent on your workload if you're cutting together

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short to medium length 1080p videos 16 gigs should be plenty

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but the sky is the limit here if you use tools like after effects you can expect

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needing 16 to be an absolute minimum and

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as the complexity of your project increases so does your RAM requirements

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our latest season of scrapyard wars for example because of how darn much footage

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was in the timeline immediately crashes with anything less

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than 64 gigs of RAM although for more

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information about how much RAM you need for video editing specifically you can

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check out our video here where we tested it with up to 128 now it should be noted

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that all of what i'm saying concerns system memory and not video memory which

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is used for loading in 3d objects and textures for your graphics card's use

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this is very important for games and also professional applications

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but is probably a discussion for a different video

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one i can almost guarantee will end with well it depends one interesting side

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note before we wrap up is that as we moved up from four gigs of RAM our

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system boot times actually got slower it was only at most a second more but this

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is cool if you're aware of a Windows feature called super fetch it actually

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makes sense super fetch tries to intelligently preload some programs into

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RAM so that they'll launch faster when you need them so the idea is that if you

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run out and buy excess memory it can still be used for something which

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doesn't mean though that we're saying to do that as you might have noticed RAM

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prices are out of control right now so

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our recommendation for general users and gamers is eight gigs if you're looking

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to scrape by and be ready to upgrade later and 16 gigs if

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you want to be comfortable for a while as for the workstation users out there

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well uh it depends

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and you know what else it depends on that doesn't depend on that at all

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forget it Corsair's new light loop fans

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these things look freaking incredible

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they have dual RGB lighting loops with

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16 independent RGB leds in every fan

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that are split between two separate loops allowing for nearly endless

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customization the included Corsair lighting node pro enables dynamic

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lighting effects with other Corsair link supported devices and they've got

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complete pwm control so they can be controlled anywhere from 600 RPM all the

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way up to 1500 RPM depending on whether you want them to be quieter or cool more

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efficiently so check them out over at the link in

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the video description because come on baby it's RGB you know you love it

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so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that

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like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is

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our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum

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which you should totally join