Retesting how much RAM you need for gaming your way!

[@GeordiLaForgery]

Nice test it's also good if you like having a web browser open whilst gaming. I've got wreckfest running with web browser (20~tabs) using about 13GB.

[@markbayhon]

This is really an interesting topic for people that is new into PC Building, it really depends on the use of the computer. But most likely you will use it for other purposes other than gaming. And will install other applications as well. 8GB of ram is a bit not so so. I have computer with 32GB, I play the game "The Division 2" and sometimes an MMORPG in average it consumes 14GB-16GB. Having a 32GB gives room for the computer to be more smooth machine for any purpose. DDR4 now comes really in a good price you can get 32 GB for as low as 75 euro.

[@Konkr420]

few years ago i got a 64gb kit on sale for like $150. chrome is still trying to finish that meal

[@DowsettReviews]

Honestly expected the difference to be much greater. Good video bud

[@1Fracino]

Great vid, thanks for doing this. Have 1 idea for you, what about Value Ram, the basic Corsair type stuff that you can get as 8, 16 or 32 GB sticks. I think the speeds are the same but they don't have heatspreaders or fancy RGB stuff on them. If you don't have any around to test no worries.

[@1Fracino]

Just had another idea, what about slower clocked 2 x 4Gb Ram vs higher clocked single stick of 8Gb, would that be worth testing ?

[@TechLabUK]

@@1Fracino Great ideas, will see what I can come up with.

[@1Fracino]

@@TechLabUK just had a thought, what about 2 x Single channel? 2x4Gb, 2x8Gb and 2x16Gb ? Should be slower right but have never seen it actually tested before.

[@GlitchedGame0]

I think 16gb is the sweet spot from personal experience. I once tried Elden ring with 8gb ram and it stuttered like crazy until i added an extra 4gb stick, same thing happened with mortal kombat 1. Currently sitting at 32GB and I couldn’t be happier 👌🏽

[@germainetaylor1757]

Its 16 gigs for 1080p but for 1440p or 4K its 32gigs of ram if you don’t want a stuttering mess that is at least if you are not just playing esport and indie games for open world and single player titles you need more and faster ram to keep up especially ic you are on a windows machine with all the background tasks and so on .

[@johnpaulbacon8320]

Thanks for this very well done and informative video.

[@antondovydaitis2261]

Thank you. This is much closer to what I have.

[@2cars10]

Really interesting to see this config since it should perform very close to my 5700x3d 6600 xt rig

[@CherryColaWizard]

Your PC looks really nice!

[@Jwalker76]

It really is amazing how well 8gb ram manages to run. There is a difference between 16gb and 8gb where i think its worth getting 16gb just because ram is so cheap right now. I also wonder how much of that difference is single channel vs dual channel.

[@TrusteftTech]

I guess as long as the games are still being made with the PS5 target, 8GB will continue to be enough for most, as long as you don't do anything else while playing. Thanks for the video.

[@TechLabUK]

I would always recommend 16GB due to doing other things at the same time and that they mostly come in 16GB kits but it's real interesting to see how none of it makes a difference.

[@TrusteftTech]

@@TechLabUK Word. I have 16GB on my laptop, but only because it can't take more for some reason (i7-4710HQ from 2014). I am trying to fix my other 2014 laptop which already has 32GB RAM, which is also with a i7-4710HQ. Which makes me think that Lenovo or Intel or both, were lying. I would never suggest less than 16GB of RAM, no matter what the usage. In the real world, as you say, you are going to do other things too. You are not going to use your gaming PC as an 8/16 bit console. Heck, I built a PC back in 2005 and it had 8GB of RAM, I would not accept the same in 2024. Edit: Typo.

[@KrGsMrNKusinagi0]

my PC literally Uses 6-8 GB just to run no applications or games open just maybe youtube running

[@dotxyn]

Going from 8GB to 16GB really helps the 1% lows. Did you notice less stuttering too?

[@TechLabUK]

Not really, the 1% lows were fine with either in terms of RAM amount, just a bit lower with the 8GB but some of that could be down to the single channel setup vs the dual channel.

[@dotxyn]

@@TechLabUK Either that or the swap from VRAM to DRAM. I noticed in Alan Wake 2, the VRAM was maxed at points so likely some spilt over into DRAM, causing some stutters and texture render pop-in.

[@WnDTech]

Great video buddy

[@marknewellmusic]

This topic is always hilarious because it is treated as subjective when it has always been objective... I am one of those people who specifically went out of my way to build a system with maxed out, 128GB ram, here's why: I built a used system packing an i7-8086K with an Asus Rog Maximus XI Hero Z390 ATX motherboard. The board takes DDR4 and runs on a PCI-E 3.0 version. I wasn't going to buy new for budgeting reasons so that ruled out DDR5 modern builds and DDR4 ram was a lot cheaper at the time than the newly released DDR5. Knowing the board was PCI-E 3.0, I wanted to keep a GPU running at x16 speeds so I bought a used M.2 sata SSD for the OS so it didnt halve the GPU lanes to x8 PCI-E 3.0 My plan all along was to max out the ram and most of my budget was put into the RAM and the GPU purchases. The RAM would be picking up the slack for the lack of an NVME drive being used and I also wanted to run RAMDISKs - so far seems a waste of money on ram right? Here's where the objectivity kicks in, going from a 'nice to have' and 'solving a board limit problem', into objectively how much ram will I actually need based on my usage going forward... Games will dictate how much ram most people need unless they also use their PCs for work related tasks - most games will only need max of 16GB ram, some will need 32GB and a tiny few will need 64GB. My 128GB will be using as much ram as possible for ramdisk so leaves me with flexible amount that I can alter on a case by case basis by shrinking/increasing the ramdisks size. Here's some examples: Bare minimum ram for OS etc 16GB gives me a ramdisk of 112GB which I can use for a whole games files giving me speeds faster than any NVME drive - this makes a huge difference for modern games that stream data constantly eg level data etc Again, case by case when games are small I can set the ramdisk to be smaller to be just enough to store any game eg splits like: 24GB for OS etc leaving 104GB for game ramdisk 32GB/96GB 48GB/80GB 64GB/64GB This also allows for multiple ramdisks to be created for non gaming purposes such as scratch disks for content creation and also a ramdisk for development can speed up compilation time with large programs such as game development. Coming back to gaming and talking objectively about RAM needs for specific games, if you play open world games with streaming level data, you are going to want 32GB or 64GB in your system, if you play Star Citizen you are going to want 64GB ram in your system, if you play games with lots of mods you are going to want more than 16GB ram. General advice to cover most peoples usage would be 32GB at this point giving 16GB minimum, but allowing the extra 16GB to grow as future games need more ram. Having said all this it also depends on how often you plan to upgrade systems as those on long term builds like myself will want to max out ram or at the very least, buy the largest capacity sticks so that 2 slots can be populated giving dual channel speeds but allowing for more overclocking ability due to 2x sticks putting less strain on the IMC than 4x sticks do.

[@wertywerrtyson5529]

We used to go from 1 to 2 to 4 GB pretty quickly but it seems 16GB has been enough for ages now. I think it’s been the sweet spot for over a decade now. Imagine a decade ago to have the same amount of RAM you had a decade prior. You would have around 0.5-1GB in 2014 which obviously wouldn’t work. RAM needs have really slowed down.

[@matthewday7565]

With a 32GB kit available, you could have done 16GB single vs dual, to rule out the effect of dual channel versus the increase in RAM - or pick up a couple of 4GB sticks from CEX

[@TechLabUK]

Could have done but this is what Patriot sent us and we weren't really bothered about the dual vs single channel effect, more about the amount as that's what people are always pushing.

[@dotxyn]

@@TechLabUK I believe he's talking about comparing 1x16GB vs 2x8GB to rule out an effect from dual channel. Most people building now may opt for a single 8GB, but a lot of people probably have 2x4GB already and could be considering an upgrade. Also, there is the notion that Ryzen is hurt more by single channel than Intel, so it would be cool to see that tested.

[@fuzzylumpkins6034]

I am above the means of the average pc user and budget gamer. I use 32gb 4kmhz ddr4 in my gaming rig because I can and I prefer have the headroom. Same as my GPU. I use a 7900gre with a 5800x3d. If I was gaming at my needs then 16gb/6700xt/5600x would be perfect. The issue and question is, will AAA gaming actually get better and new titles be worth buying in the coming years? My rig is built with an expectation of new games being worth buying again in the future as right now they have been pretty garbage with a few exceptional titles here and there since 2020. But none of those titles have required more than what I could use instead of what I am using.

[@TechLabUK]

We all wish and prey they will be but right now it seems to be rare that we see any decent games coming out.

[@leexy3395]

I have 32gb which I bought on 2019, But I sold the half of it and currently just running 16gb. The reason is because all of the game I played no near consumed a lot of ram's. So 32gb is pretty useless to me

[@fuzzylumpkins6034]

@@leexy3395 32gb is a step too far for majority of us. I have only run 18gb at one point for a short period when I used my gaming pc for work and gaming at the same time on 2 monitors. Now that I have my work set up at home, I keep the 32gb just because it is there.

[@SlowHardware]

I'd be testing 7 Days To Die for ram usage, that game loves ram

[@leexy3395]

Well, 16gb is really enough for gaming unless you're a boomer opening 200 tabs in your browser LMAO

[@ruancoetzee472]

Nice video and I don't want to sound negative. I'm just disappointed not to see Fortnite tested since I've seen it use up to 19 GB of RAM in 32 GB configuration

[@TechLabUK]

We don't generally test eSports kind of games because we don't play them really.

[@ares23dc]

Well, I have started playing Throne & Liberty, which has released 2 weeks ago. 30-31GB of ram used with few tabs open in Chrome, Discord, audio player, and streaming. I'm guessing I need to purchase 64GB soon.

[@kevinsheppard6085]

To get windows 10/11 to run smoothly you need 8gb of ram. I brought a cheap i3 laptop with 4gb and added another 4gb and the change was night and day, it was literally delay opening anything vs buttery smooth . I think for gaming 16GB is the sweetspot most of the games I play use no more than 12gb of memory. In my main system I have 32gb and it only ever uses most of this when using adobe for creative stuff and even then not all the time. Interesting video thank you.

[@DowsettReviews]

Just got with 16gb is my opinion for a budget gaming system. Ddr4 is so cheap these days ya might as well rather than 8gb even if it doesn't make much difference. Even 16gb ddr5 is reasonably priced.

[@hill2hell]

A person only needs 16gb for gaming, but if you're also doing other things aside from gaming you'll benefit alot from having more ram. Because nowadays people do still game alot, but they also use their computer for their livelihood like video editing or animations, and having alot of ram really helps with those use cases. But if the pc would just be used strictly for gaming and nothing else 16gb would still be plenty for it.

[@litebkt]

And many of us are driving at least two monitors when a bunch of othrper stuff is running as we are gaming.

[@hill2hell]

Yup, I have 2 monitors and back then if I ran an intensive game with any internet browser 16gb causes the game to stutter sometimes if there's alot of tabs it just freezes and closes one. But after I upgraded to 32gb that never happened again.

[@websitesthatneedanem]

Looking for advice for a silent midrange gaming PS, Tower desktop Please? ⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉⁉

[@TechLabUK]

What you stuck with?

[@MrAckers75]

Windows 11 will disable loads of non essential background tasks with 8gb of ram that’s probably why it ran so well

[@hygarthwilliams6392]

Try ddr3

[@antondovydaitis2261]

Dance Dance Revolution 3?

[@forog1]

Ram needed for gaming in 2024 8gb = "laughable" 16gb = "bare minimum" 32gb = "sweet spot" 64gb = "future proofing" 128gb = "but why?"

[@ares23dc]

12600KF is very close to 5800X3d in games. The difference between them is only visible on RTX 4090 cards. I would rather buy a 12600KF and invest the difference in a better gpu.

[@TechLabUK]

It is quite close but it doesn't have the 3D V-Cache which is why it was chosen for the re-test.

[@geofftottenperthcoys9944]

Blur and Film grain are the FIRST things that get turned off

[@TechLabUK]

Yup

[@siruno6024]

now test how much ram do you need for skyrim modding at 4K

[@bumbeelegends7018]

32 is the sweet spot in 2024

[@gejamugamlatsoomanam7716]

Remember if you use a ryzen cpu always use single channel ram 😅

[@Dingbat1967]

Totally predictable - RAM doesn't make much difference.

[@zilverman7820]

In some games yes but most of the time not.

[@litebkt]

It doesn’t make sense to design and sell a game that only plays on high end hardware.

[@TechLabUK]

@@litebkt it doesn’t to me either but they are doing it. Alan Wake 2 really needs new GPUs with mesh shaders to perform well and even the new Star Wars release requires RT capable cards because you can’t fully turn RT off.