How much ram? 4gb or 8gb?

I'm ordering a new laptop and I'm wondering how much ram I should get?

I don't want to spend more than I have to. So 4gb or 8gb? Just a little information that might help: I'm a programmer.

thank you very much for your replies!

 

I like 8GB a lot better. You should probably go with 4GB and upgrade it yourself to 8GB if you need it. It will keep you from buying the 8GB unneccessarily and will be cheaper.

 

Memory is typically cheaper to upgrade yourself. But as far as choosing the right amount it all depends on what you use the computer for.

 

4GB is enough, then if you ever decide you want an upgrade, then go get an aftermarket 8GB..Cause the overpricing for an 8GB RAM upgrade is crazy..

 

Some upgrade options via manufacturers websites right now are actually on par if not slightly above the price of what you can get if you do the upgrade yourself.

I'd personally go with 8Gb... especially if we're talking about x64 OS.
It likes more RAM.

 

Light usage (not much multitasking, no virtual machines, no RAM consuming applications like Photoshop): 4GB
Advanced usage (Multitasking, Virtual machines every now and then, Photoshop, etc.): 6GB
Heavy usage (regularly working with VM + Multitasking + regular usage of RAM consuming applications): 8GB

I started with 4GB but found out that it is by far not enough for a heavy multitasker and occasional Photoshop user like myself. Upgrading to 6GB allowed me to disable the pagefile and the system is flying now. Looking at the stats 8GB would help me sometimes, but would be rather luxury.

My own comparison to the "old" XP systems is:

4 GB for Win 7 (x64) = 512 MB for XP
6 GB for Win 7 (x64) = 1 GB for XP
8 GB for Win 7 (x64) = 2 GB for XP

So if you find that your old XP machine worked just fine with 512 MB and that was enough for your needs - you can go with 4GB now.
This system works at least for me - 512MB was not enough, whereas 1-1,5GB felt just right (which corresponds to 6GBnow).

 

If you are a programmer and you have a 64 bit OS, go to 8 GB RAM. You can never go wrong with more RAM unless you have a 32 bit OS.

 

Wow, thanks a lot for the helpful replies. Have a nice day all!

 

I currently have 4GB and am moving to 8GB. Most people will never see a difference between the two. I personally use very RAM heavy programs and plan to use a large part of that 8GB for a cache anyway.

 

I have 8GB of RAM just for the heck of it.. Well I open large games at the same time..Just cause I can.. Call of duty on one tab, alt+tab to Mirror's edge, alt+tab to world of warcraft..Those kinds of stuff and I still don't get to use all 8gb lol..What was the thing about disabling pagefile? Will that help with performance? I have a lot of RAM to spare so what else could I do to my RAM to help increase performance? How do you use RAM for cache? I've never heard of these techniques..hmm,cool..

 

I think the most i have ever used with Windows 7 64Bit is around 2.5 GB RAM if i remember correctly. Browsing the internet and watching movies at the same time use nothing more than 1.3GB RAM.

I understand that it is nice to have more RAM to use from and that X64 -supports- more than 4GB, but i don`t quite understand how you would need anymore than 4GB if youre the average joe..

 

Try disabling the pagefile and use your system normally - unless you use that much RAM that you hit OOM, which I doubt, as I almost never hit it with my 6GB and heavy multitasking + Photoshop, you should notice a speed increase

You first need to understand what the RAM indications mean in order to realize that your system actually uses much more than 2,5 GB

You need to distinguish FREE ram from AVAILABLE ram... What you are referring to is that you have 2,5GB in use and the rest is AVAILABLE, but it is not FREE And that's the main point. Some time ago I thought of a very good example of how it works:

Imagine a public bus with say 100 seats, 60 of which are for disabled people. So normally you would have like 90 seats taken and windows tells you the following:

30% = 30 seats used
60% = 60 seats available (in case a disabled person, a pregnant woman, etc gets on)
10% = 10 seats free

So you think - "Great, My PC only uses 30% of my RAM, I have more than enough!", which is not true! Actually your PC uses 90% of the seats (RAM), BUt 60% can be freed up in case the system needs them.
But see, while it is true that those 60% can be made free, this means those 60 "not so important" people will have to travel standing (the data will have to be transferred to the pagefile which is located on the very slow in comparison to RAM hard drive) or even get off the bus, which means your system is slowed down immensely!

So if you want to get the most of your system, you need to ensure that there are enough FREE seats for all (important and not so important) passengers to sit at and avoid people traveling standing ot getting off the bus (the most efficient way to do this is to forbid people to travel standing = disable the pagefile)...

So again - if Windows 7 tells you that only 30% are in use - this is not exactly true - this means 30% are used by data that cannot be moved no matter what. But the rest is NOT free - most of it is being used, but is available for more important data... the price though is speed loss!

 

I've never run into a bottleneck with Win 7 X64 and 4GB's. And, yes I game and have a lot of stuff open at once.

I actually normally run JC2 in 800x600 window mode, and keep all my tabs and word docs up at once.

To clarify, 4GB's is still a plenty for most.

 

I wonder how you know that? People consider 160 km/h for very fast... right until they get a chance to travel with 240 and say "Wow... this IS in fact much faster".....

There is ALWAYS "faster"... well at least until you reach the speed of light

 

Disabled pagefile.. What about the write caching? Is this difficult to do?

4GB is enough for regular users I agree..I had no problems with 4GB ram running games/apps/browser/word all at the same time..I never even got close to using up all 4GB..

 

It is not about enough or not but do you want to pay(and how much) to make it faster(Windows 7 can function with 1G RAM and you never need to worry about OOM by default, it is just dead slow). The XT has a 30-40 dollars premium due to its SLC NAND cache. I would rather pay that price for 4GB DDR3 RAM(that was once the price, not sure now) as it serves the same purpose and more.

No memory in Windows 7 is wasted, at least not in the 6-8G range. Going beyond that, I am not sure.

 

I think i know the difference between available, cached and free.

I did an experiment now:
I have 2 youtube video opened, TLOTR playing on VLC, firefox with 4 fans open, Steam running, the game Magicka running, utorrent downloading a file and Avast performing a full system scan. A bit over the edge but could happen to the Average Joe in rare occasions.

Windows Task Manager says:
Total: 4076
Cached: 1443
Available: 2052
Free: 691

This means that 691 MB are free, unused space in RAM. 2052 MB is data that is both cached and free. However not all cached are actually used by anything, it is just data that is on "standby" that can be zeroed and used by applications at any time. So in this example i have more than 700MB available RAM for use with my little experiment.
I agree that it is -nice- to have more than 4GB, but for 95% of the users it is not nescessary IMO

 

I come from 4GB to 8GB and it doesn't feel faster or anything. I've barely used more than 3.5GB before but when doing CAD + Computing , it helps quite a bit. Unless you open a few games each time , you don't need 8GB.

 

QFT. The majority of people, even gamers, don't need more than 4GB right now. There are much better uses for that money, on an SSD or better GPU or even a faster CPU.

 

At what price you base that on ? 4GB DDR3 is around 40-50(well was, didn't check recently). Not sure how that can be translated into an SSD or GPU/CPU(both are much more complicated to replace on notebook).

 

If you want to do a real, more accurate experiment - disable pagefile and continue using your laptop normally... If you don't hit OOM - you are right - you don't need more than 4. If you however hit OOM - that means your system is normally using the pagefile actively (which is MUCH, MUCH slower) and your computer is slowed down immensely.

Simple.

 

It doesn't matter. The money is even better used just being saved. A $50 upgraded CPU is more likely to have more effect for most people than $50 more in RAM.

You're also talking about end-user prices and not prices for RAM when ordering, which is what the OP is asking about. Those are even higher, and even MORE of a reason to skip the upgrade to 8GB.

 

I had 8GB's in my old Macbook Pro 13, no noticeable difference over the stock 4GB's.

Running Windows 7 X64.

I would have to say your example is wrong.

4GB's is like the average car, 8GB's is like a tow truck. Both go the same speed, one can do more if needed.

For every day usage, I'd pick the car.

 

When the RAM exceed the cacheable content, it becomes waste.

My rule of thumb(on my Windows 7) is that I would like to have around 2G stuff being cached. So if my usage pattern(excluding cache) is between 2-3G, 5 would be optimal for me.

 

Did you disable the pagefile

 

Mac is not Windows. Not sure about Mac(which is BSD based) but you don't need to disable swap file on linux as even though it is enabled, it is used as the last resort unlike Windows.

edit:
oh, miss the running Windows 7 part. forget about the above comment. sorry.

 

Oh, well for that matter there wasn't any difference in OS X either.

Yes, after I installed the 8GB's, I didn't see any need for a pagefile

 

End of the story
Couldn't say it better by my self

 

Come on with the ram amount questions


Make it simple for you


Can you have too little? Yes

Can you have too much? No


Get as much as you can afford and go enjoy your computer!

 

^Agree... there's really no reason, other than financial ones, to not get the maximum RAM. It has 0 effect on battery life (it can increase it by reducing HDD access) and it can effect performance.

 

8gb I say is the best number for now.

 

Disable pagefile will do absolutely nothing to the system other than creating a whole bunch of problems. The data that is in the pagefile is also on the RAM and vice versa. That is the whole purpose of the pagefile: To be able to flush out the RAM if a program suddenly want 80% of it, and then you have a copy of the data already stored on the HDD. That is why the size of my pagefile is 4GB. It doesn`t magically put it on the HDD -instead- of the RAM if there is no need for flushing the RAM. It use both so that you have a copy if something demanding comes along, and another copy on the RAM to access it much faster.
I did not run out of RAM, i had 700++ MB left and there was no fetching from pagefile.sys

 

While I agree about not diabling the pagefile generically, there are some people woho do. Your explination is way off though so if you plan to keep it do so for the right reasons not these!

I would however suggest you read up on what a page file really does and when it is required because if you think the 4GB is a 100% miror of ram and visa-versa you are WAY, Way off. The primary reason for pagefile being disabled is that it is essentailly a variable DB mimicing paged ram that can have data swapped in and out. Since IOPS of HDD's and transfer rates are WAY below that of ram is why it is so slow. Now this is an overly simplistic explination so again read up on it before you try and explain it.

Also while you read 700 MB free you severly limit the OS capability of caching the HDD files along with other caches such as Texture memory for D3D along with a host of other background functions. As you see below without a page file I am well over using 4GB with standby even though only 1.91 GB is showing used in TM perfomance..........

Edit; this is with page file disabled..............

 

I don't quite understand..I turned off pagefile, is this bad? I have 8GB of ram and I rarely hit even 4GB..2GB is where I'm usually at..I noticed you have a lot of cached memory, is this something that would improve performance? How do I do this? Thank you..

 

Turning off pagefile can only boost your performance, as long as you don't hit OOM (Out Of Memory), which you most likely will not with 8GB.

Windows caches on its own - you will see that with On-time your cache will increase. Once you restart the process starts all over again.

 

I have read about pagefile. Yes i agree that not all of the RAM is on the HDD. It was a bit over the edge to explain the pagefile function.
If you have a bunch of programs running, the programs you have not been using that runs in the background get moved to pagefile while the programs that are active stays on the RAM. What i meant about disabling pagefile does nothing but create a whole bunch of problems is because whenever you need to use the programs that was running in the background again, it gets moved to the RAM for faster access. But if you have enough RAM you won`t need to use the pagefile since it is enough "room" for all the data in the RAM. Pagefile is a nice safety feature because if you actually run out of RAM it will use HDD for safekeeping, but if you don`t use the pagefile and run out of RAM, the system will crash. And from my understanding you won`t have any noticable slowdown when using pagefile either if you have enough "room" in the RAM for it to be moved to when you need it. It is just a safety feature.

While i do agree that it is nice to have enough RAM to store graphics etc, my example is waaay over the top for someone who example game. Nobody would run 3 movies, a virus scan, download files, surf the internet and play a game at the same time. If so they deserve to run out of resources and be hit with a huge performance block. So like i said, 4 GB is more than enough for AVERAGE JOE.

 

Just throwing this out there. I know at least 4 or 5 ppl that browse and have keep about 90+ tabs open in chrome and/or firefox, and then using the system for other things. Now, I don't know how much memory each tab takes, but I would recommend to them to NOT turn off paging.

Microsoft has the correct setting (enabling virtual memory paging) by default in Windows. However, if ppl think they never load enough apps (including the windows services/processes you don't start manually), using "resmon" (start -> run -> resmon) to monitor how much memory is used is a must.

As mentioned above, in simplistic terms virtual memory pages (swaps) memory between disk and your system's physical ram when needed. If all the processes running on a computer at any given time never reach physical RAM limits, there's no need. So, using resmon (along with running any/all your apps) and monitoring memory for "Hard Faults/sec", "Commit", and "Working Set" should give you an idea of any bottlenecks you may encounter/avoid with the two different settings.

With this data, you can better judge which configuration runs better in your circumstance. FWIW, the more memory you have (8GB, 12GB, 24GB, etc.), the less swapping would happen (if it even happens at all). Under a light load, you shouldn't see any swapping, (but a little book keeping within the swap file) so by turning off virtual memory paging all you probably accomplish is to reclaim some disk space.

 

Right. I find it funny how 4GB was more than adequate when Windows 7 was launched. Now that 8GB has become very affordable, it's now "required". I only have 16GB because it's cheap and I run VM's, but even so, 8GB would probably be more than adequate for me, and 4GB if I didn't run VM's.

 

My server (serve 12 people) is 4GB RAM.

 

Yeah i agree. I don`t understand why. Is it because they are trying to justify their choice? I mean i hear them when they say it is always nice to have more RAM but i disagree that it is required.

 

See, the keywords are exactly "required" and "advised".

No, more than even 2 GB is NOT "required" - you can run a Windows 7 system with 2GB or even 1 GB! It's a fact! But it is "advised" to have as much RAM as your personal work pattern requires in order NOT to use the pagefile, thus using all the performance the rest of your system can offer you!

It's all about speed and responsiveness! That's why I find it funny when people say "I have never felt my system being bottlenecked by 4GB RAM" - yes... sure... the only way to feel it though is to know how much faster it could be with 6 or 8 GB ram (and disabled pagefile).

The pagefile is a great little invention to substitute RAM whenever enough of it is not present - so that your system can run stable. BUT it slows down the system. That's it.

You just want a running system - no you don't need more than 2GB RAM.
You need performance - 4GB or more depending on your usage. Light usage - 4. Advanced - 6 or even 8.

 

For the record, my visual studio opens faster for some reason..When I went to 8GB from 4GB and disabled pagefile..Cool, my personal experience is that disabling pagfile did indeed make my system more responsive..Well at least when I opened Visual Studio with a medium sized program with lots of pages in it..Used to take a lot longer, not it opens almost instantly..I don't know if it's because of any other reason, but upgrading RAM is all I did..(and disabled pagefile)

Cheers

 

page file is just slow RAM. And ever since the day of Intel 386 where page fault was introduced, the HARD limit for 'required' RAM is just RAM that is non-pagable(or whatever limit microsoft set to refuse to boot). I think it is 512M for Vista/W7 and I once ran XP with only 64M RAM(that was slow when it needed 256M active page file backing).

BTW, RAM as everyone knows is RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY. Whether a HDD is suitable for RANDOM ACCESS is up to the individual.

 

What i meant and i am pretty shure what HTWingNut also meant, was the amount RAM needed to not being limited by the RAM when doing the workload that is typical for the average user

 

Question: Using pagefile with SSDs are faster than HDDs right? What are the speeds RAM, HDDs and SSDs operate with?

 

Yes. much faster. I have page file enabled on my x25m backed system because I am lazy and my RAM usage can swing huge(multiple VM for testing). I think RAM is like 3 order of magnitude(may be more) faster than SSD and same ratio between SSD and HDD(mainly the access time as page file access is typical 4K RANDOM read).

 

I have just upgraded from 4GB to 8GB of RAM and have not noticed any big difference in performance. Win 7 uses the RAM as I have looked at task manager and there is 90 meg free. Lots of RAM is good for users that bounce around from program to program (like me). A good time to spot the difference is when closing a game. If there is not any free memory it takes longer to return to desktop.

Also RAM is over 10x the speed of a fast ssd.

 

Ok thanks. I tried to google it up but couldn`t find any information about them. According to a forum user at Macrumors the differences between SSDs and RAM is:
1066 DDR3 RAM in dual channel - 17.1 GB/s (0.94 nanoseconds latency)
SSDs: 200-300MB/s (Intel G2 latency 65-85 microseconds)
Fastest SSD with 4K is what? 50-100Mb/s?

If this is true that puts things in quite a perspective

 

FYI unless you disable the page file it will almost always be used with certain programs... they use it by default.

edit: And yeah, the difference between HDD and SSD isn't even close to the difference between SSD and RAM.

 

Disabling the page file is not a good idea. There is a ms developer blog that goes over why. Cannot remember URL.