How much RAM is too much RAM

[the lemming]

Can you ever have too much RAM?

[Polygon]

no, but eventually you will either

A: run out of space on your motherboard
B: Realize that instead of wasting money on 4gb of ram, you can get like 1 gb of ram and spend the rest of your money on other pieces of hardware, like a new CPU or GPU

[maniacmusician]

more than 2GB is excessive, unless you really need it for a specific purpose; most people don't. 2GB will satisfy almost every normal user. even 1GB will satisfy the majority of normal users.

Money not spent on RAM can be well used for buying storage. For example, for anywhere between $90-$130, you can pick up a hard drive from 320-500GB. That's a pretty good deal. There's other computer accessories you can buy as well. So yeah, going easier on the RAM in favor of other pieces of hardware is a great idea. Just make sure you don't have too little.

[gradedcheese]

Can you ever have too much RAM?

Sure... a 32-bit system can only address 4GB of RAM (being 2^32). So if you could install more than that in a 32-bit system, I would say it's too much ;)

[mech7]

You can never have enough ram i know have 4 gb on my desktop with XP x64 and 2 gb on my laptop.. Depends on whay you do though 3d apps can take huge amounts of ram when rendering or sculpting, no need to have that amount to surf the web or anything :)

With me 32 bit os only recognizes 3,25 gb though so 64 bit really makes it worthwile :)

[rai4shu2]

Actually, since the Pentium Pro you can access 36-bits or better of memory. The MMU was what handles that stuff, not the CPU.

[BuffaloX]

Depends 100% on what you use your system for.
Some of the newer Windows games requires 2GB to work with all features.
The generic answer would be, 1GB is best for most.

[kilou]

People who don't have enough RAM just go buy more. You probably have too much RAM when you start asking if you can ever have too much RAM...... :lolflag:

[jinx099]

anything over 640k is overkill.

[M$LOL]

I'd be more concerned about how fast the RAM is as opposed to how much (as long as you have about 1GB).

[axel-vpk]

I actually find that 1 GB is kind of overkill. I have 1GB on my AMD Opteron 170(@2500MHz) machine, but It is very rare that more than 300-400 MB are used at any time. But I guess it depends on what you use it for.

It is kind of scary how much memory is needed simply to run the operating system nowadays. My 486 laptop runs Slackware fine with 16MB RAM..

[insane_alien]

depends if your running massive physical simulations or not.

i'd say whenever your processor becomes the bottleneck is when you have too much RAM.

[ssam]

if you have spare RAM then linux automatically uses it to cache files that you have read before. next time you want to read the file it will already be in RAM, so it does not need to be read from disk again. RAM is much faster than disk (especially in access time, but also in data rate).

try running

top
in a terminal and looking at the wa figure in the third line. this is how much time is spend waiting for information from them disk. watch that while something like openoffice opens.

for me the first time i open openoffice, wa is at about 75%. the second time is stayed at zero. (this is with a 1Ghz G4, and 1GB of RAM). with a faster processor disk is even more of a bottle neck.

[kilou]

I think that if you're running virtualization you might benefit from a large (>1Gb) amount of RAM because often you need to share memory between the virtualmachine and your host system. If you want to run application in the virtualmachine through remote desktop and use some aplication in your host system at the same time I think that >1Gb is not overkill.

[ArtificialSynapse]

anything over 640k is overkill.

hahaha :)

I have 1.5 gb but I'm stuck with a stupid intergrated video card that's eating 256mb of it, AND the ram is rather slow. . .

[diskotek]

different wuestion here: what's differences between of RAMs that have 333mhz, 400mhz etc.. it's up to motherboard to mhz of RAMs? is it possible to use different frequences (mhz) RAMs on same motherboard? what's that :confused:

the question is rising through my machine, i have 64 bit amd, with 512 DDR 333MHZ Ram.. i would like to have new one, but i got confused with this Mhz thing :(

[WiFi Ed]

anything over 640k is overkill.

Bill, is that you?:)

[kilou]

different wuestion here: what's differences between of RAMs that have 333mhz, 400mhz etc.. it's up to motherboard to mhz of RAMs? is it possible to use different frequences (mhz) RAMs on same motherboard? what's that :confused:

the question is rising through my machine, i have 64 bit amd, with 512 DDR 333MHZ Ram.. i would like to have new one, but i got confused with this Mhz thing :(

AFAIK you can use any frequency RAM on your computer but it will work only at the max speed that the motherboard can handle so if you get 400Mhz RAM but your motherboard can support only up to 333Mhz your RAM will work at 333Mhz. It will work but you'll pay for 400Mhz while you'll get only 333Mhz. So you should use the RAM sticks with the correct frequency for your motherboard, not less, no more. It's important to get the fastest RAM if possible (that is supported by your motherboard of course) but I think that latency is important too.

[diskotek]

AFAIK you can use any frequency RAM on your computer but it will work only at the max speed that the motherboard can handle so if you get 400Mhz RAM but your motherboard can support only up to 333Mhz your RAM will work at 333Mhz. It will work but you'll pay for 400Mhz while you'll get only 333Mhz. So you should use the RAM sticks with the correct frequency for your motherboard, not less, no more. It's important to get the fastest RAM if possible (that is supported by your motherboard of course) but I think that latency is important too.

ok, i see clearly now, what does it mean. thank you

[Detonate]

If you don't have many ewes and a lot of RAMs you probably have too much RAMs.:) :) :)

[Compucore]

I would agree with maniacmusician's maniacmusician for general purpose 1 gig is enough for the average . Unless your running something like a server that is in the datawarehousing where you have gigabytes to the terabytes of data to process through. anything past 1 gig is too much. Trust me. I used to do month end reports on a computer that was way underpowered in ram. And most of the time when I needed to get an odbc to import the data that I needed to get month end reports. ANd then run them for month end and the 5 year history on 1500 products.

Compucore

[goumples]

I have an old box that has 64 megs of ram in it and it runs just fine for internet, email, and office stuff.