Windows 8 RAM.

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by encus, Nov 2, 2012.

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  1. moontan

    moontan Registered Member

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    some of us like to run computers or OSes that were made in this century. :p
     
  2. Wild Hunter

    Wild Hunter Former Poster

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  3. TairikuOkami

    TairikuOkami Registered Member

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    I had a gaming PC with 8GB and 64-bit OS and I hardly ever used more than 2GB even for games like Crysis. I eventually sold 4GB and I did not miss it at all. I am wondering, how can plenty of RAM increase performance, unless it is used instead of a pagefile? I find odd, why to buy more RAM, when less is sufficient? I will rather buy a bigger HDD.
     
  4. Hungry Man

    Hungry Man Registered Member

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    @TomxEU,

    While your use case may have been fine with 4GB (I think 4GB is plenty for a gaming machine as games aren't going to be used while multitasking most of the time) some others may do many things.

    More RAM never hurts - your OS will use "Free" RAM to cache files and buffer. I've only turned on my computer a few minutes ago and already about 1GB of RAM is being used as cache.

    I think 2GB is a solid minimum requirement, 4GB is the sweet spot for the vast majority of users, and 8GB is kinda just "may as well" since RAM is so cheap.
     
  5. Kerodo

    Kerodo Registered Member

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    I had 4GB with my desktop and now on my laptop, both running Win 7 x64, and have never had any problems whatsoever, seems to be plenty for me, but then again, I don't put huge demands on my hardware either, so perhaps that's why. I have run systems with too little ram, and I agree, that's a royal pain in the you-know-what.... :)
     
  6. nosirrah

    nosirrah Malware Fighter

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    A note about "enough" ram. Windows does not fill up ram and then once full switch to the page file. Instead it computes an amount of data that can be paged based on how much total ram you have, how big your page file is and how much memory you are currently using. The more ram you have the less that will be paged.

    In short if you use 2 gigs and have 8 gigs available compared to 4 gigs, MS will page less to the page file and your performance over all will be slightly better.

    That being said drive throughput here obviously comes into play. If you have 4 gigs and a top tier SATA600 SSD and rarely use more than 2 gigs of ram upgrading to 8 gigs will not be noticeable at all other than maybe 1 or 2 seconds less boot time. On the flip side if you for some reason have installed windows 7 on a 5400 RPM SATA 150 HDD with 8 megs of cache and went from 4 to 8 gigs of ram you likely would notice the system was snappier even if you never come close to using the 4 gigs.
     
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