8 Gb RAM for gaming

Is there any benefit for games today/in the near future from 8 gigs of ram?
Does 8 gig support depend on the motherboard?
Is the best thing to do order a laptop with 4 gigs and add 8 gigs later?

 

on a desktop with the highest settings you can break past 4gb on some games but you wont use nearly 8.

for a laptop... totally pointless and will be for a very very long time untill they can handle the settings & resolution that a ultrahigh end desktop can.

ram limits have multiple points of limitation, first is the hardware, the chipset has to support it, after that your bios has to support it, the 3rd and final part is the operating system. You have to have a 64bit OS to address more than 4gb of ram.

32bit generally will give you only 2.8 to 3.2gb of ram usable.

 

Some games actually will take advantage of the extra ram. If you can afford it, go for it.

 

Yep, for gaming useless.


But, if you multi-task, especially while gaming, it helps a lot. Also, depending on your superfetch settings, it speeds Vista up quite a bit I find. NWN2 is almost an instant load for me now.

 

Really no point on a laptop. On a desktop maybe because RAM is so cheap on desktops.

 

no point on a laptop and really anything past 4 gigs is just for poo and giggles

 

Size is nothing after a certain point, after that speed is everything..

 

8GB is useful for industrial/workstation applications. I use 8GB (XPS M1730) and 6GB (Inspiron 1720) and it's quite beneficial for my photoshop, graphic design, Corel PhotoPaint and etc. 4GB is too little for my needs.

I hit about 6 - 7GB all the time. One time I hit 7.8GB high. I multitask alot.

But for the everyday joe I wouldn't recommend no matter if you got money to spend. And now 2x4GB kits are hella expensive. I somehow managed to buy mine at the right time totalling USD$320 + shipping.

2x4GB SoDIMM sticks here in Singapore is retailing a whooping SGD$1900 ~ appox. USD$1200.

In regards to gaming, I would concentrate on the GPU you're using instead. Now that, is something to bother about. And to some extent, the CPU also.

Stick to 4GB; get x64 to take advantage of the full 4GB; look out for low timings and... be happy. Look at the GPU. To me whenever I buy any laptop, the GPU always really bothers me. As it is something that is -generally- difficult (Not disassembly wise) to upgrade than the other components like RAM, CPU and HDD(s).

The support for max RAM, CPU type will all depend on your motherboard, chipset and BIOS revision and etc. like what Vicious has pointed out.

EDIT: Yes, I am a regular gamer as well. Crysis, COD series, FO3, Far Cry, GTA and all the graphically intensive FPSes, armed with dual 8800M GTXes in SLI and I can honestly tell you the jump from 4 - 8GB is virtually unnoticeable. I can help you run some benchmarks of all games' graphic settings and resolutions if you want to see the difference from 4 - 8GB; if you really want to. Don't worry.

Good luck.

Hope this helps.

 

you can update the ram in the desktop upto the 8 GB or for the reqirement.

but in the laptops it is useless and are costly .

they set the resolution and graphics card for the 8 gb ram .

but its good for the future gaming.

 

what about RAM speed?
how fast should it be?

 

what ever your chipset supports a default max, for current laptops thats mostly DDR2 800mhz

latency used to be very important but newer tech has really made that something not to fret over, so I will not blow your brain up by getting into what the latency settings are all about.

 

Even 4gb is not that useful then why 8gb?
Waste of money.

 

8 gig is overkill, even for running OS. at most a high end OS will need 2.5 gig to run smoothly, but with the way apps are coming out that do great things, 6 gigs would be enough for a couple of yr, but 8 is great for future proofing your lappy

 

spradhan01
if u wanna 8GB go and buy them for 600-700-800 dollars
they just released for laptops and it's not common
it's no worth to buy them if u want top what everybody using and cost 40 -50 dollars
and what is affordable is 4GB DDR3 RAM 1066MHz

 

Eh I would not say that, by the time 8gb is needed your lappy equiped with it now will be garbage, gpu, cpu, chispet will have evolved several times, heck the ram wont even be the same probably. Wont be too long till DDR3 starts to take over the common DDR2, and soo long after DDR3 is common a new one will come around the corner.

I mean what good would 8gb of DDR ram do you right now? Any decent machine is on DDR2.

 

you can access the many programs and application simultaneously .

you can play a 3D games also .

RAM increases the speed of the computer.

 

Personally, I don't find any amount of RAM to be overkill. I generally advise getting as much as your budget for the given system allows.