RAM: How much do you really need?

[Gizenshya]

I have (well, the system in my sig), and it supports up to 8 GB of RAM. I have 4 gb now, and I've seen tons of people with 8 GB. I could spend the ~$40 to get another matching pair, but I really don't understand why... (I don't plan on it atm, just curious).

Why are there so many people out there with 8 GB of RAM? Lots of you have it, why so much? I've never bee close to filling up my 4 GB, and can run (in Vista) more than one graphically intensive games (like Crysis and Call of Duty 4) at the same time, with plenty of RAM to spare.

So what about 8 gigs am I missing?

[OutOfReach]

Some people like to run VM's and other memory-intensive programs. Honestly, I think 2 or 3 GB (maybe even 1 gb) is enough, more than that is, IMO, overkill.

[HappyFeet]

I guess it really all just depends on what you plan on doing with your computer. 2gb should be good enough for the average user. If you do virtualization, I would suggest at least 3gb.

[swoll1980]

I would agree that vms would be the only reason you would ever need 8 GiB of RAM, other than geek cred of course.

[ghindo]

How much RAM you want/need really depends on what you're using your machine for. If you're doing resource-intensive tasks like gaming, video editing, running a VM, etc., then lots of RAM makes sense.

If you're running an Arch install with Stumpwm, then I'm sure you can scrape by with less.

I'm running 2 GB on my laptop and that's been a comfortable amount. I could probably do alright with 1.5 or 1 GB.

[tcoffeep]

Geek Cred > Everything Else.

This is true in everything in life. Not just RAM.

[H2SO_four]

Sky is the limit! ATM I have Karimic in VM, Audacity, Opera and Deluge running and I am at 1GB usage. If I were running the 64 bit OS the mem usage would be even higher. 8GB is a lot, I have not seen my usage above 2GB. I guess it really just depends on what you plan on using your machine for.

[CharmyBee]

I use 192MB for my older systems. 512MB if I plan to game on XP at least or boot a full Ubuntu. 1GB if I plan to play 2005+ games, and 2GB only for heavy editing and new games. Any more than 2GB is just unused ego points.

[MikeTheC]

How much cash do you have? That's the deciding factor at this point.

My next machine will have *at least* 4GB in it, and depending on prices may well have 8 in it.

What would be nice, actually, is if you could allocate some of the RAM in a RAM-heavy system to being swap, kind of like the old RAM disk concept.

[majamba]

it doesn't matter because there would a microsoft application that would use all of the memmory