I'm building a small form factor PC to take to University with me... I only want it to play games... its going to have a 4960 i5 @ 4.6 ghz overclock and a GTX 970 powering it.... but I'm still troubled by RAM... its just a gaming device. No rendering, no video editing nothing. Just 1080p or 1440p gaming (not sure if I'm going to bring my 27" or my 24"). So what do you think? 16gb - http://www.scan.co.uk/products/16gb...-19200-(2400)-non-ecc-unbuffered-cas-11-13-13 8gb - http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-...0(1866)-non-ecc-unbuffered-9-10-9-27-xmp-150v I mean we're talking £40 difference so its not major... but still don't know if its worth spending the extra £40.... will it make any difference? Cheers guys
I would go with 8Gb, thats is plenty of RAM for gaming and for a student £40 is fair amount of beer and pot noodle. Perhaps if and only if you are using a board with only 2 RAM slots get 16GB just in case you do suddenly need more in the near future but generally since the price keeps coming down as time goes on so swapping them out later probably still makes just as much sense.
8GB will be more than enough if you are only gaming. there are still very very few 64-bit games out there so they will never use more than around 2GB MAX leaving a cool 6GB free for system.
8 GB will be plenty for your purposes. 16 Gb kits are (comparitively) good value - get twice as much memory for less than twice the money. If you've got money to burn there's no harm in going for it...but you'll need that money at uni for beer
Another vote for 8GB. Sure, if you buy 16GB then Windows will happily 'use' it, but it won't noticeably improve performance in the vast majority of situations.
I went down from 12 in my old rig to 8 in my current rig, I've not really noticed - nothing I can't do that I could do before, except have a 4gb ram drive that I didn't use much.
What course are you doing at uni? As a mechanical engineering student, I've got 16GB as I often use 10+GB on CAD and FEA projects.
8GB if as you decribe you will only be using for games. It won't stop you from doing anything, but it will mean that you may have to close things down before you game, especially if, like me, you like have plenty of chrome tabs open.
Personally I'm going to go with 16GB for my next build. I do monitor my Vram usage in game and find that games like Dragon age inquisition and GTA V can get near the ram limits, and increased swap file usage is showing up on my SSD usage. I expect some of this is down to memory leaks in early builds of the games but it doesn't hurt to plan ahead for the future.
Another vote for 8GB; I've got 16GB "just because" and have no real need of it, it offers me nothing really over 8GB which most people (especially for gaming only) will never need or use.
I guess that the question here is: do those games need that 16GB headroom, or are they just using it because it's there? In other words, would you notice any performance difference between 8GB and 16GB?
I doubt they actually need it, or they shouldn't without the memory leaks but I expect it would provide a more consistently smooth experience and wear less on my SSD. looking at the ram in the op, the 2400MHz 16GB is only £40 more than 8GB 1866MHz. If I could only afford 8GB I would be happy with that as I have been for a while now.
As I assume you are going with an itx board with only 2 slots... why not do the obvious thing and get a single 8GB stick now? If you change your use case in the future, or see some other reason to increase the ram you can. The performance difference with single channel vs. dual channel is so small it's pretty much irrelevant.
What I'm driving at is this: is the PC just filling the available RAM "just in case" it's needed and then having to cycle stuff in and out of the page file as required? I can see how that might reduce the amount of loading from disk somewhat, but I'm not convinced that you'd see a real performance hit - if a game has 50GB of assets, then it's still going to have to load/unload a considerable amount of data between RAM and disk. Surely the only way to avoid that would be to have greater RAM capacity than the size of the game, which isn't going to happen As for the point that the 16GB kit is only £40 more than the 8GB, it's true that that isn't a massive amount of money (especially given the total cost of all of the other components in a PC), but it's still additional outlay. If that additional outlay isn't providing an actual real-world benefit, then it's wasted imo.
Just to inject some data here, I started up Skyrim and ran around for a bit. From my 16GB of RAM (and page file disabled), I ended up with approximately 4GB in use and 0.5GB free. The rest was eaten up by disc cache, which does have a noticable impact on loading times, but less so if you have an SSD. Personally I would always go for the most RAM I can afford, but for gaming you don't need >8GB.
