Optimal amount of ram for gaming?

What would yall say is the least amount you should have for gaming? The best?

 

The least amount of RAM for gaming is the least amount of RAM your operating system will boot with. This assumes your "gaming" is Freecell and Minesweeper.

The "best" amount of RAM for gaming is 128GB. This is the maximum amount of RAM a modern 64-bit OS can currently access.

(you really need to be more specific)

 

4GB, considering thats a good amount without going overboard from 4GB to 128GB ram I don't think you would see much a increase in most games, since they don't really seem to take up any more than 2-3gb at a time.

 

In my experience, 2GB (min) for XP and 3GB (min) for Vista to have the best performance. Also, disabling your page file may be of use depending upon hard drive speed. It is very risky, but I have found it to have some benefit.

 

Doesn't boost ready help in gaming as well?

 

It will, but its effect is dependent upon your hard drive speed/amount of RAM. If you have a 7.2k drive with 3GB+, you will see near to no difference as compared to a huge difference on a 5.4k drive with 1 GB of ram. If you fit in the second category it is worthwhile, if you fit into the first I would not even worry about about.

 

Yea, I agree. I wouldn't bother using ready boost unless your low on ram. I gave it a try, and for me, it was useless.

 

Readyboost is primarily designed to allow older computers with slow hard drives and minimal amounts of RAM to run Vista as smoothly as possible. It doesn't really serve a gaming performance purpose.

Depending on what kind of games you're trying to run, I'd say 1GB for XP and 2GB for Vista is the minimum to get decent performance.

 

4GB ram should handle today's and the a couple years in the future.

 

4gb is fine for most games, the only ones which would see an increase in performance are crysis, gta 4 etc.

In the long run, don't bother going higher than 4gb unless you need it for other programs which do a lot of number crunching. Once you go past 4gb the prices normally ramp up a lot too

 

4 gb is more than enough for now and wait for 8gb's price to be reduced.

 

Just go with 4GB, you won't regret it.

 

I was using Vista 64 bit with 2 gigs of ram, and recently upgraded to 4 gigs. Wow, what a difference! Best 30 dollars I ever spent on an upgrade.

 

WinXP should have 2 GB. Even when playing Crysis which uses a full GB just to itself, on 2 GB it bottlenecks on the GPU and CPU before it does on system RAM.

On Vista you want 3 GB at least, the more the better since Vista will automatically allocate half of it to "Vista graphical crap". Of course to have more you need Vista x64 to use 4 GB which is the current must have amount of RAM for Vista based gaming machines.

 

2-4 gigs of ram

 

I DON'T recommend you disable your page file unless you know exactly what you're doing.

No, readyboost is useless.

Agreed. 2 GB on XP, 3+GB on Vista. Since RAM is so cheap, it's not a big deal to just go for 4 GB no matter what.

 

this one's so easy ... the more, the better. I'd get 8 gigs for crytek n such But for Optimal use and budget issues you're good with 4gigz dude

 

4gb is heaps! However as the cpus and motherboards advance, obviously this will change. The new Intel i7 CPUs for example, run best on ram added in lots of 3, so 6GB RAM would be best for that system.

 

4GB seems to be pretty much the optimal number for any sort of dual-channel DDR2 RAM, and it's pretty inexpensive these days. Of course, as HowardZinn pointed out, the new Core i7 desktop processors require DDR3 RAM, and supports tri-channel, so 6GB and 12GB are pretty common for setups with the i7 processors.

 

Average to high-end gamers need 4GB, and I'd say the max you could ever possibly use at this point is 6GB. 8GB is just overboard for most folks, and it's as expensive as an X processor sometimes.

 

4GB is enough for now and I bet games like GTA IV only use so much RAM because they are poorly optimised with bad memory leaks.

 

wrong.



and btw, as a 32bit game can never use more than 4gb ram (and actually most can't allocate more than 2gb afaik?), you don't need more than the amount the os wants + the amount a game can have max. as long as there aren't really much 64bit games around (none +- 1, 2), i'd say 6gb is the absolute max that could be of use.

 

wrong. Placebo effect. Pagefile never hurts except in the moments a system without pagefile would go bluescreen/crash your app. it actually helps to give your apps more ram where they need it.