How much memory are you guys running?

Deadjasper

2[H]4U
Joined
Oct 28, 2001
Messages
2,568
I current everyday box running Mint Cinnamon has 24GB. Is that enough or would I benefit from more?
 
I just 16GB on one of my computers and 32GB each on the other two computers. I cannot see where you would benefit from more than 24GB.
Agreed. Unless you are running some VM's or something, or DCing (depending on project), 24 is more than adequate and you won't really see a difference going for 32.
 
I'm using 32GB in my machine currently, but I know that's more than I need right now. But, then, I always overbuild my system to try to get it to last longer so I can wait a couple of generations at least before upgrading/rebuilding.
 
16GB for me right now. I used to have 32GB years ago, but I never even used like half of it, so I went with 16GB of faster mem on the last refresh.

I think 16GB is still okay, but I would definitely do 32GB if I was building a new machine today.
 
2GB is "enough", provided you are running very simple applications (no modern web browser, to be sure). 4GB is what I consider minimum required for a decently responsive system, 8GB min if you plan to play any recent (10yr) games, and 16GB if you also do things like run VMs, work with large datasets, have lots of stuff open at once, etc..

You'd know if you needed more than 16GB, imho.
 
on my main system, 32GB and I actually need more than 16GB for things like long game streams, video editing, rendering, etc but 24GB would probably be enough.

on my secondary laptop, 4GB which is fine for internet and watching streams/movies/shows/'Tube
 
I'm running anything from 2Gb (SBC) to 512Gb (server). Like mentioned previously, it all depends on the use case.
 
32GB on my Precision which is more than I need. 16GB on everything else. 16GB is more than enough for a majority of the population.
 
16 GB on the laptop. RAM is soldered, so there was no way I wasn't going to go for less. Lots of browser tabs, an IDE, the occasional VM guest or two, etc.

Desktop is also 16 GB, has been since I built it 8+ years ago. It mainly serves as the Windows gaming box, but dual-boots. When it's replaced (when part prices come back down to normal, ha!) the new system will almost certainly be 32 GB.

Proxmox host is 32 GB. Free/TrueNAS box is 16 GB.
 
How did you get 24GB? I assumed you could only have 16GB or 32GB. But yeah, I would say 16GB is not quite enough for a high-end system these days, and you really need more like 22GB. I manage to use that much just using a web browser with a bunch of tabs open, especially if I'm doing something else in the background like compiling an application.

I would say 24GB is actually the perfect amount... more than 16GB which is starting to hurt and require more careful memory management like 8GB did 4 or 5 years ago, but 32GB is still slightly overkill most of the time. I already had 32GB of DDR3 in my old system and was used to it, and when I finally built a new system I couldn't bear to downgrade to 16GB to save money or justify ponying up for 64GB... so I just wound up with a couple of 16GB DDR4 modules. The memory was a sidegrade.
 
How did you get 24GB? I assumed you could only have 16GB or 32GB. But yeah, I would say 16GB is not quite enough for a high-end system these days, and you really need more like 22GB. I manage to use that much just using a web browser with a bunch of tabs open, especially if I'm doing something else in the background like compiling an application.

I would say 24GB is actually the perfect amount... more than 16GB which is starting to hurt and require more careful memory management like 8GB did 4 or 5 years ago, but 32GB is still slightly overkill most of the time. I already had 32GB of DDR3 in my old system and was used to it, and when I finally built a new system I couldn't bear to downgrade to 16GB to save money or justify ponying up for 64GB... so I just wound up with a couple of 16GB DDR4 modules. The memory was a sidegrade.
Three 8gb sticks. Triple-channel config in certain intel boards. Edit: or six 4gb sticks, but I don't know how common that config was.
 
Last edited:
I had 16GB for a long time and didn't see a need to upgrade since my rig is 99% for gaming but a couple months ago I upgraded to 32GB just to scratch the upgrade itch and gotta admit the computer feels a little snappier. Granted the only place I definitely noticed a difference was when Alt/Tab'ing out of games back to the desktop. It's instantaneous now with no lag at all. So I'm glad I did it but don't think it changed my life or anything.
 
16GB and rarely get over 10GB used. I almost always have byptop running to monitor.
 
Three 8gb sticks. Triple-channel config in certain intel boards. Edit: or six 4gb sticks, but I don't know how common that config was.
That is pretty surprising. I was always taught you have to install memory in pairs, couldn't mix RAM of different sizes, and have the same amount of RAM on each channel. Maybe that's old info, though. So yeah, I was thinking he must have 6GB or 12GB sticks somehow to make that work, and wondered if they were 8GB sticks with a bad 2GB chip on them disabled, etc. 3 sticks of 8GB seems way more obvious and common sense now that I know that can be a thing.
 
That is pretty surprising. I was always taught you have to install memory in pairs, couldn't mix RAM of different sizes, and have the same amount of RAM on each channel. Maybe that's old info, though. So yeah, I was thinking he must have 6GB or 12GB sticks somehow to make that work, and wondered if they were 8GB sticks with a bad 2GB chip on them disabled, etc. 3 sticks of 8GB seems way more obvious and common sense now that I know that can be a thing.
I used to have a setup that used triple channel ram, had to install in sets of 3 instead of 2, but that didn't seem to last long, guess it was more of a fad than anything else.
 
There is also quad channel. I had that on my old X99 board. Had 8 sticks of 4GB each.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Nobu
like this
That is pretty surprising. I was always taught you have to install memory in pairs, couldn't mix RAM of different sizes, and have the same amount of RAM on each channel. Maybe that's old info, though. So yeah, I was thinking he must have 6GB or 12GB sticks somehow to make that work, and wondered if they were 8GB sticks with a bad 2GB chip on them disabled, etc. 3 sticks of 8GB seems way more obvious and common sense now that I know that can be a thing.
Back in the old old days, you used to actually need to do things like that, I think 4x 30-pin or 2x 72-pin matched memory or you wouldn't boot on most systems. Since then, matching up memory has usually been more advisory than required; you'll lose out on performance by not filling things properly, but it'll still work most of the time. 16 GB + 8 GB in a dual slot board will get you to 24 GB; and Intel was doing either multiple of 3 channels or 3 DIMMs per channel or something on a lot of the Xeon servers I was working with for my last job (dual 2690 v1 - v4), so they had maxes like 768GB and 1.5 TB; I think we stopped at 1 TB of ram on our biggest machines, ran out of CPU before we could use more ram.
 
Back in the old old days, you used to actually need to do things like that, I think 4x 30-pin or 2x 72-pin matched memory or you wouldn't boot on most systems. Since then, matching up memory has usually been more advisory than required; you'll lose out on performance by not filling things properly, but it'll still work most of the time. 16 GB + 8 GB in a dual slot board will get you to 24 GB; and Intel was doing either multiple of 3 channels or 3 DIMMs per channel or something on a lot of the Xeon servers I was working with for my last job (dual 2690 v1 - v4), so they had maxes like 768GB and 1.5 TB; I think we stopped at 1 TB of ram on our biggest machines, ran out of CPU before we could use more ram.

Yeah, that's what was thinking. So how much performance would you lose from mismatching? Like, suppose I'm on a Z77 motherboard, and I have 4GB installed in each channel for a dual-channel setup with a free DIMM slot for each channel. A couple years after building it, I find it's not enough and I need about 20GB of RAM for some specific task. What I actually did in that situation was sell off my 8GB kit and buy a whole 32GB kit of 4x8GB. But if instead I had chosen to buy a 2x8GB kit, and put another 8GB in each channel using the free DIMM slots so that each channel had 12GB, and total installed memory was 24GB... would that have incurred a performance penalty, or been fine because each channel has the same amount of RAM?
 
Yeah, that's what was thinking. So how much performance would you lose from mismatching? Like, suppose I'm on a Z77 motherboard, and I have 4GB installed in each channel for a dual-channel setup with a free DIMM slot for each channel. A couple years after building it, I find it's not enough and I need about 20GB of RAM for some specific task. What I actually did in that situation was sell off my 8GB kit and buy a whole 32GB kit of 4x8GB. But if instead I had chosen to buy a 2x8GB kit, and put another 8GB in each channel using the free DIMM slots so that each channel had 12GB, and total installed memory was 24GB... would that have incurred a performance penalty, or been fine because each channel has the same amount of RAM?

You'd really need to benchmark to be sure if there's a performance difference (and on your actual application, not just a memory benchmark tool), but I think as long as both channels have the same module configuration, you should get dual channel, so adding the 2x 8GB kit should keep you in dual channel. Of course, now I'm reading about Intel flex mode which does dual channel for low memory addresses with what amount both channels have, and then single channel beyond that, so who knows; it's complicated. :D
 
From 2018 until last month I had 16GB of RAM in my main system. Currently at 32GB where it will stay for a while. More than I need.
 
My gaming rig is a Z97 pro with 8Gb of ram and I haven't found the need for more. But granted I don't play games much anymore.
 
32 GB in the main computer because I sometimes need to run multiple test runs simultaneously, and the x100 tests want up to 8GB each.

16 GB is enough for an awful lot of use cases.
 
My gaming rig is a Z97 pro with 8Gb of ram and I haven't found the need for more. But granted I don't play games much anymore.
Also still running a Z97 here, with 4790K. Originally had 32GB RAM in it, but split off 16GB to my wife's computer when I had to rebuild her one some years ago. May upgrade the whole thing in the next year, or may just replace to storage from a kludge of old SSDs and HDs to something new and just keep the rest.
 
Also still running a Z97 here, with 4790K. Originally had 32GB RAM in it, but split off 16GB to my wife's computer when I had to rebuild her one some years ago. May upgrade the whole thing in the next year, or may just replace to storage from a kludge of old SSDs and HDs to something new and just keep the rest.
Until last year I was running the Pentium G3258 @4Ghz as the CPU even lol. It ran world fo tanks just fine. Now I have the same cpu as you after my son upgraded his box. By far the biggest upgrade was the Samsung 32" curved display I got for free from work.
 
I'd really like to upgrade to a newer platform just for NVME support since I'm going to upgrade storage later this year, but honestly though this machine is still fast enough for now so it's not really worth the expense. Back in the day I would just say "f it" and build a new fairly high end machine. Nice to droll over a 5950X or some such, but this old rust bucket still keeps going 24/7.
 
Amazon just delivered 16GB for a new box I'm building. 16GB just about needs to be the minimum these days.
 
I have 16 gig in my Ryzen 2600x server box and that is likely to be plenty for it for the foreseeable future especially since it was previously a Q6600 with 8 gig of RAM and never had any issues.

My main machine is a Ryzen 5800x with 16 gig of RAM and it has been enough except for one instance where I was running a distributed computing program which would eat up up to 1.25GB of RAM per work unit. Other than that I haven't come close to needing more but it would have been nice to have more. If it had been in the budget I would have gone with 32 gig simply to future proof since it's not likely I'll be doing another system upgrade for years.
 
I went from 16 to 32 and noticed some definite improvements with larger jobs using Adobe Creative Cloud. It's also pretty nice when I end up using several programs at once (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, etc.) and I'm not even doing work with video, which really benefits from more. For basic day to day use and gaming I haven't seen much, if any, difference, though.
 
My VM server runs 128GB, my work laptop runs 16GB.
Docker host runs 32GB.
PBX runs 8GB.
 
I guess not totally Linux related, but I had to buy another 16GB to maybe make Unreal Engine 5 smoother.

They list 32GB as minimum and 64GB as recommended. I looked at the 64GB kits but they were a little steep (around $400-500).

Decided to just get another 16GB of the same RAM I have (since I have 2 empty slots) and that was only $160.

Should be enough for now, might build a new machine with 64GB next year (or whenever things go back to normal).
 
Back
Top