Is More Ram for Future Games Overkill?

I'm getting a laptop with 8GB ram and Nvidia 960M for playing games at medium settings. I know the graphics card is strong enough to play games for 1 or 2 more years at medium settings, which is ok for me. But my concern is the ram. As I said I got 8GB ram but it cant be upgraded since its soldered. But will that be enough to play games at medium settings coming out 1 or 2 years from now?

If not, should I get a laptop with expandable ram? If so, mind you, I can only afford one with Nvidia 960M.

Someone said that getting a laptop with Nvidia 960M but with 16GB ram is overkill for playing games. And that 8GB ram is enough. What do you think?

 

Gaming is all in the GPU of your system. I have 32GB of ram and it doesn't make a bit of difference. The important thing is can you upgrade your video card when it begins to fall behind playing games. Medium settings to low to not playable at all is a bummer.

 

8GB should be enough. I've not played any recent released title but the most RAM (while gaming) I've used is 7.6 something.

also see if you've 1 8GB stick or 2 4GB sticks. 2 sticks probably gives you a tiny bit more performance.

 

you should be good with 8GB of ram, don't worry about it; and by the way with a good overclock and aiming for minimum 30 fps, your GPU can hit high-ultra ( with FXAA or SMAA) settings easily

His ram is soldered, and dual channel or single channel only affect CPU performance, so it's not really an issue in gaming situation since with his configuration the gpu will be the main bottleneck.

 

Ok no problem. I now want to know if disabling services or using tweaks can extend battery life. On the HP Omen, the battery lasts 5 hours. Can it be extended to 6 hours maybe?

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As long as you keep stuff closed on your desktop, and nut run with 100 browser tabs open at once you should be fine. But 8GB is minimum these days. 16GB is the "sweet spot" for any system expected to do more than browse a few web tabs.

 

Bill Gates was wrong. Get what you can afford.

 

Like other have mentioned, 8GBs of RAM is fine, but don't mess too much with page file and don't forget to close some RAM hungry programs when gaming.

 

8 is too low. 16 minimum. With how cheap RAM is these days though... Go all out and get 32GB. Yes, your synthetic scores will suffer unless you have a quad channel system but in reality... The ability to have multiple virtual machines running and still have ample room to play games is incredible. That's besides the fact you can dedicate half of the RAM to a RAM disk and never have loading time...

 

Agreed, 16GB RAM is the absolute minimum nowadays...

 

Yep, all of my computers have 32GB RAM or more and it is GREAT.

 

I like using RAM disk as scratch for video recording. Doesn't do any wear and tear on SSD and speed is not an issue.

 

Buy it while it's cheap. Seriously. With DDR4 taking over, watch pricewatch.com and catch a deal.

(as a moderator, it is my duty to inform you all that I in no way am associated with Price Watch and I'm posting their site purely for informational purposes only. I do not get any sort of compensation from them for referring you to their service, I've just used it for years and I've gotten great deals and wanted to share it with the community)

 

Hmm, I'm bored so I'll chime in...

I concur with the rest saying that 16GB's is what you should have on a gaming machine. For a laptop you never plan to game on nor expect to do any other intensive tasks, 8GB's is the minimum I recommend, even if less will suffice, for the extended life benefit of the laptop, as future software and applications will only consume more and more RAM. However, considering the markup on memory from OEM's, and the fact that their memory is often times worse than aftermarket brands (i.e. Kingston HyperX Impact), I'd recommend purchasing a system with 8GB's but upgradeable to 16GB's.

Good luck.

 

I'm getting headaches with the 8GB, I need 16Gigs, cannot run VMs smoothly with Chrome opened....Looking for HyperX Impact 1866MHz CL10 if it works or Vengeance 1600MHz CL9.

I've used my m15x with 8GB at that time, 2016 16GB is a must and quadchannel is recommended to go full bore

 

At least 16Gigs in whatever form you like:
- with the system
/ + hassle-free
/ - expensive
- as an aftermarket upgrade
/ + cheaper
/ kinda - you have to undo a few (at most) screws, and you have to bother with the ordering and etc... is it really that hard? I'll leave that to you

I've maxed-out 8Gigs with Watch Dogs and that was almost 2 years ago, I don't see newer games any less demanding. And as already mentioned, get as much as possible as soon as possible, there's no such thing as useless RAM. You might not use all of it today, but you will one day, and trust me the prices would be ridiculous (spent more than I'm willing to tell for 2x4GB modules DDR2 back when I needed it).

I can max-out my 24Gigs with just Palemoon and Chrome running... just for bragging

 

You could approach the question in a different way, of course: how little ram can you technically get away with before running into problems? For example, even when swapping large areas in the Witcher 3, the actual system ram never will be active on more than 6gb if you're limited to 2gb on the graphics card ram. If you drop the texture packs, and force the system to not retain cache and pre-adressed/not loaded resources, you get away with 4gb easily even on new games that can adress larger memory areas in one go and will do so out of resource saving concerns.

Conversely, if the texture and static resources exceed 16 gb of graphics card ram, it makes little sense to have less than 32 gb system ram if any preloading in system ram occurs at all. Since otherwise the system wouldn't conceivably benefit from unpackaging or streaming for preparation of swap towards graphics card ram.

In the same way, windows will always make use of as much ram as it can get it's hands on, and without very fast and more importantly predictable io, this isn't always going to be helpful for the framerates and so on, even if it makes sense from a more work-related point of view. After all, windows will routinely assign exclusivity to background processes based on for example how quickly it can shift a process out of the queue, regardless of whether it was something nothing else was waiting for, and a small nation of starved little processes are about to keel over, etc. So more ram, regardless of context, is not necessarily going to pay off over better resource handling austerity

 

As most have already said, 8gbs is perfect for causal/medium browsing. 16gbs is the sweet spot! 32gbs and higher is great for video editing and other heavy applications. Today I Just dropped in an extra 16gbs, making a total of 32gbs. I loaded up the latest graphics drivers and launched Tom's Division........No improvement on the performance. Running at 72fps @ 1080 and 21 fps @ 4K with default settings. Hope this helps.

P.S. definitely due as J.Dre said and get a machine that can allow expansion of ram, if you so desire down the road. Ram is cheap!

 

I'm sorry but with how cheap DDR3 is... Max it. I sound like a broken record but you'll regret it later if you don't. DirectX 12 broke all of the promises... As always, DX12 requires more of everything than DX11 or DX10... Sometimes I think a new DirectX is only released to sell new machines... I mean look at the requirements for Quantum Break... Oh and trust me, for the steal Prime members get for 47.99, I won't be canceling the order...

 

If you haven't realised yet M15x runs 16GB fine There is even physically compatible DDR3 sodimms that are 16GB (32GB kit) available since January. Timings are slow but wouldn't shock me if they work too! M15x FTW

http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/ct2kit204864bf160b

 

I there anything that m15x can't do! ?

 

Use RAM at 1600MHz when bumped with 920XM CPU.
920XM can work with it but BIOS doesn't let so.

P.S. FSB OCing is not the same.

 

True 1333mhz is the limit...but you can drop the timings a bit to compensate

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If you have a 960m, the GPU will date you before the 8gb of ram.