since our last video on this topic a lot has changed AMD took the CPU core wars
to the next level NVIDIA turned rtx on
and apple dropped the new mac pro but has RAM usage changed do you wanda
really need one and a half terabytes of RAM or we'll just a dab do you to find
out we tested a variety of workloads
everything from opening browser rams and chrome
excuse me browser tabs to high
resolution gaming to 4k video editing to
complex flow simulation on a single 4
gig stick of RAM the smallest available for ddr4 all the way up to a monstrous
256 gig kit and everything in between and
how much do you need well as always the answer is
it depends and as always here's a segue to our
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green screen we're gonna have that linked below
just like last time we're going to track page file usage with performance monitor
and open up tasks until we notice activity in the page file that threshold
where the system starts to swap data out of RAM and onto the boot drive is
important not because you would instantly see your system slow down to a
crawl but because that's where you could see a dip in system responsiveness when
switching between apps or even an increase in load times for programs that
have been paged to your SSD or hard drive before we begin though i want to
talk through one of the most important choices for a video like this
for our CPU we went with the 24 core AMD
threadripper 3960x because it allowed us to test every one
of our RAM configurations on the same ASUS zenith 2 extreme motherboard
eliminating that as a variable we also went with that because we wanted a
system that was reasonably representative of what will become
available to general consumers over the next few years we could have plonked a
64-core processor onto that same motherboard but
that ain't going mainstream while the way things are going 24 core actually
might thanks AMD we went with an rtx 2080
super graphics card of course our mp600 one terabyte boot drive and a variety of
Corsair vengeance memory that was chosen simply because Corsair has an incredibly
broad memory lineup that covers any config we could want and they sent it
over to us at four gigabytes everything is about as you would expect we're
sitting at around 50 usage after logging
into Windows before we've even done anything simply opening chrome and
watching a 4k youtube video immediately pings the page file crossing our
threshold if you avoid video the good news is that you can open six to seven
tabs of various text and image based sites before you see page values and we
got to about 125 tabs before chrome decided it had enough and completely
pooped itself eight gigs was much better
we comfortably handled three 4k videos from youtube and 27 tabs at the same
time before we saw any page file usage
630 tabs later we saw the system become unresponsive and laggy anytime we tried
to load or reload a page maybe on Linux four gigs would be okay
but eight gigs looks like the lowest we'd recommend for a good Windows 10
experience with 16 and 32 gigs we stuck
with the three 4k youtube videos can only watch so many videos at the same
time and made it to 430 and 730 other
tabs respectively before tapping that page file now chrome wasn't very happy
when we hit our max tabs in either case but as long as we didn't touch anything
else the computer was actually still usable it's safe to say that anything
beyond this is pretty much colossal overkill on to the games shadow of the
tomb raider calls for eight gigs of RAM for its minimum spec and 16 for its
recommended spec rainbow six siege wants six gigs of RAM minimum and only eight
gigs recommended and finally we've got cs go that needs just
two gigs of RAM just two can basically run on an overclocked
potato at this point all of our games were run at 1440p and
the highest settings with no motion blur obviously
starting at 4 gigs of RAM cs go well as
advertised ran just fine at 278 frames
per second with no noticeable issues but while both tomb raider and siege
seemed to run well at 90 and 154 FPS
respectively what's interesting here is that these great looking numbers did not
translate to a great gameplay experience due to occasional frame rate dips
both games reached about 60 page file usage so i think we know what to blame
tomb raider jumped to 103 FPS when we switched to 8 gigs of RAM and smoothed
out considerably with almost no stutters or hitching to be seen and rainbow six
also improved to 155 FPS so okay not really but just
like tomb raider all the stuttering was gone
csgo added a whopping six frames but sarcasm aside it was a solid experience
with no issues as we'd expect so eight gigs then is still plenty for
gaming well here's the thing on a sanitized
benchmarking Windows install nothing else is going to be running in the
background that's not representative of the real world and when tomb raider and
siege were running they were using seven to seven and a half gigs of RAM and the
page file hit 20 usage on occasion so
having chrome discord and or a music app open in the background would likely
affect performance to some degree fortunately moving up to 16 gigs gives
us plenty of room to work with just like there's plenty of room in your closet
for our merch ltdstore.com average frame rates either stayed steady or improved
and we had plenty of headroom to record our gameplay or stream in the background
past this point though there was no real performance gain or loss adobe premiere
cut four and eight gigs down pretty quick with the four gig setup crashing
on a regular basis anytime we tried to render just a one minute test clip and
as for our eight gig config it did manage to render the clip but it took a
hot minute as the kids say the video that we're using is a mix of edited 4k
and 8k footage from one of our past videos at 16 gigs premiere was usable
with our render taking just 3 minutes and 23 seconds
but scrubbing and playback was like watching an old movie picture reel
remember guys this is on a Threadripper and at both one quarter and 1 8 scale
so we'd say this is okay as long as you're willing to wait around to create
proxies before you edit so those are lower resolution versions of your clips
or if you stick with 1080p 32gb and
beyond is gonna help bring your render times even lower and work with much
larger and more complicated project files a lot of the usage here though is
going to come down to your individual workflow needs our editors mark and a
prime have slightly different machines with marks having 64 gigs of RAM and
prime's having 128 both of them have premiere after effects photoshop chrome
word and excel open while editing a video and depending on the video mark
will see 85 to 95 usage while he edits
and a prime will see 60 to 70 percent sometimes spiking to 90 utilization or
gigs now up until this point in the video i would forgive you for thinking
that 256 gigs is overkill for anything
but while nothing that average folks are likely to do will ever touch it
engineers and scientists will often have
huge amounts of data to deal with to the point where such a system loadout might
not even be a luxury but rather a necessity check out our RAM punisher
flow simulation benchmark the more memory you have the more variables you
can account for improving the airflow calculations around this cybertruck
model this thing can easily suck up
256 gigs of RAM and actually prefers to
have more shout out to flo joe by the way for this benchmark another example
is a professional composer and mixer like neil parfit who regularly has
projects reach upwards of 215 gigs
thanks to all of the tracks and instrument sets that he needs loaded
having them in memory means instant access now one thing our test was not
able to account for today was the increase in memory bandwidth as we
scaled from single channel to dual and quad channel configurations that's why
we focused on page file usage as our threshold rather than on the performance
differences but stay subscribed because that is something that we would like to
explore going forward so then in the end
conclusion you're probably fine with just a solid 8 to 16 gigs of RAM for
your everyday use and gaming if you do photo and video editing bump that up to
32 or 64 or 128 if you do it
professionally and beyond that well it's probably just bragging rights unless you
know for a fact that you're doing something that benefits from it
which you know we're not judging bragging rights is okay too
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like crazy RAM videos maybe check out our recent one opening up chrome tabs on
a system with two terabytes of ride it's a wild
and sometimes very tedious ride but don't worry we cut out the tdm it's just
it's a fun video stop what do you people want everybody's
messaging me