Huh.. Aside from the engineers, just about everyone in my corp has 4GB in their desktop (All 3rd and 4th gen Core). A few document control peeps have 8GB, and two Internal Communications folks have 16GB (lots of raw photo and video editing) but that's it.
Of course all the engineers have Xeon based workstations with Quadro cards and 16GB ECC RAM. No requests yet for more than that though, and certainly not a single 32GB install anywhere. These guys are in Navisworks, PDS, PDMS, AutoCAD, Bentley, etc. etc. all day long.
Wow that's gotta suck. Even S/W development requires more than 4GB. I wouldn't consider a machine with less than 8GB, but I must admit that most companies are cheap and shortsighted, especially with companies keeping PCs more than 3 years. Worse still, companies tend to buy memory from certain sellers that charge ridiculous amounts of money for standard (non-enthusiast) memory.
That said, the current round of PC's are overbuilt machines that should be fine throughout the life of the machine (16GB, fast I7 and a good GPU..though we really didn't need that part). I think that'll be fine for 4 years.
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