RAM Question

[derspiess]

In my recent build, I went with 4GB of DDR3 RAM & am running Win7 x64.  The most usage I've seen so far is 72%, and I was encoding video while watching a basketball game in HD. 

Given that a lot of people are opting for 8GB these days, I half-expected to hit a bottleneck with my RAM, but I haven't gotten close to that yet.  For those of you who are running 6 or 8GB (or more), do you ever see more than 4GB in use at any time?

[Grey Fox]

Yes but it's not something you, or anyone else, would encounter.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

I'm still running 32-bit XP, and I've never hit the swap file.

As GF said, there's not really anything out there that a home user would run which requires large amounts of RAM.  A significant reason for that is most home user software has not been designed to work with more than 2GB, even if the technical limitation isn't there.  Most of it doesn't need more than that, anyway.

[viper37]

In my recent build, I went with 4GB of DDR3 RAM & am running Win7 x64.  The most usage I've seen so far is 72%, and I was encoding video while watching a basketball game in HD. 

Given that a lot of people are opting for 8GB these days, I half-expected to hit a bottleneck with my RAM, but I haven't gotten close to that yet.  For those of you who are running 6 or 8GB (or more), do you ever see more than 4GB in use at any time?

8gb vs 4gb: (Vista and Win7)
- starts faster, stops faster
- a little less use of the swap file
- no need for Readyboost technology
- a little better handling of Blu Ray movies
- room for virtualized machines.

Downside:
- Costs 1.5 to 2x more
- Negligeable performance boost in nearly all games.  Most games are 32bits, they won't use anything over 4gb, and the only game I've seen where I needed over 4gb was Empire: Total War.
- Most apps being 32bit, same goes as for games.  The few 64bit apps are not that big, so the performance gains would be very small when multitasking.
- How many people really use/need VMs?

[Darth Wagtaros]

Don't bother.  Use the money for liquor. 

[Iormlund]

I've gone well over 8 Gb of used (not just assigned) RAM for a single app (3D rendering). I've also worked with databases that take quite a lot of memory space when running (one I'm working on now has about 150 millon new lines a year). Also handled diagnostic and packet sniffing logs that would crash most machines.

Most users won't ever do anything remotely similar so ...