How Much RAM Do You REALLY Need For Gaming? 🤔 (2021)

hello everybody i've had a week off did you notice did you miss me the realization when the answer is no today though we're answering a simple yet massive question how much ram do you actually need for your gaming computer and if you're thinking that you've seen this before linus did this two or three years ago well that was two or three years ago we've got new games we've got new systems so how much ram do you actually need a quick recap if you need it ram comes in sticks you usually use two for dual channel operation if you only use one then you're only actually getting half the speed which can be quite detrimental to games so you always need to have two sticks in your system random access memory typically looks something along the lines of this where you have quite a low profile design but nothing really too fancy it's not going to be the coolest ram quite literally or you can get something like the dominator which is usually a fair bit more expensive it has a larger heatsink but most people will be more interested in the fact that it has some lovely rgb you can fully customize in software when you're shopping for ram you need a look at the capacity and the speed the capacity is what we're testing here today 8 16 32 but then there's also the speed so this one is actually rated for a maximum of 4 133 megahertz but the thing is when you put this in your system nine times out of ten or almost ten times out of ten to be honest with you this is not actually gonna be running at this speed instead you're gonna have to boot into the bios and then enable the xmp profile that's usually on pretty much every stick of gaming ram these days and they'll actually then run it at the correct speed but please don't go thinking that this is actually going to guarantee that you'll be able to run at this speed as your processor and your motherboard do actually have a lot to say about how fast your memory can run and just because it says a speed doesn't mean you're going to be able to get it anything really over 4 000 megahertz can be quite difficult to get fully stable and the advantage is for gaming is not really something that i think is gonna make a big amount of difference but that's something i would be testing in the future arguably though the most common speed at the moment is 3 200 megahertz which is what we're using to test here today so let's do this then shall we kick off our test and actually the first thing i want to show you is just how much ram a normal gaming computer can actually use just idling so here we have pretty much all of the launchers so we have epic we have origin battlenet everything open and discord and you can see in the performance tab we're actually already using six gig of ram before we open up a game and if we take it a step further by opening up google chrome you can see that number has actually jumped now to around about 6.5 6.6 gigabytes of memory this is for just three tabs so if you imagine you're someone that wants to be playing a game maybe on one monitor while doing a load of things on the other you can really start to see how this number is going to start to add up we're going to start off with one of the heaviest games you can play right now watch dogs legions with ray tracing everything ultra and dlss and our first result is 45 frames a second so if you spend an insane amount of money on a gaming computer and you want to play maxed out watchdogs you're not actually able to get 60 frames a second at 4k that's just how intense this game is but remember this is best case scenario 32 gigabytes of ram i will run this test again this time at 1080p as for all we know there could be a big difference between resolutions maybe you need more ram for playing at 4k but less at 1080p or maybe it's the other way around let's find out but i know what you're thinking what's dog's legion does anyone actually play that well how about some cyberpunk another game that was super successful once again this is running at 4k this time the ray tracing ultra presets we're going to do something really boring which is just walk up and down this street to get a good idea of the frame raise i mean i say walk up and down i'm literally just pressing the w key until the timer goes out because that's how you get consistency and i'm scientific science centric science studio oh no that's taken we also have our multiplayer titles some call of duty warzone and everybody's favorite fortnight and true story i actually won my first ever game of fortnight the other day which probably isn't the biggest claim in the world but bear in mind i don't play it i was impressed got like nine kills because i'm good so good that i only got my first win this weekend awesome stuff then that is all of our tests complete for 32 gigabytes of ram all we need to do now is downgrade our system by removing two of our sticks safety first of course we've shut our system fully down and turned it off at the wall we now want to make sure that we're using slots two and four so i'm going to remove ram from slots one and three that's actually surprisingly hot ow yep our system is probably gonna have a little bit of a freak out and be like where's the memory gone you can see that the default speed is actually two one three three so it's a big difference by enabling this xmp profile we've got all of the same startup applications that we had open before so things like epic origin steam discord and as before we're using around about five gigabytes of ram just idling in the desktop which i guess means it's time for me to do some more benchmarking i would do it live but if it's going to be boring for me it would be very boring for you sad marcus well actually it's more like time-consuming marcus the 16 gigabyte results are in which means it's time to actually test our 8 gigabyte sticks which are going to be slightly different because don't forget if we did just use one single stick of this corsair dominator it would be running in single channel mode which would be slow and definitely not a fair test so we're going to use two of these it is a little bit unfortunate though as this is the only set of memory that i have on hand that is a two times four for a total of eight and this runs at 2400 megahertz not the same 3200 like we see on the corsair kit interestingly opening up the task manager we are still using that five gigabytes of ram just in the system so even though i thought we'd be using slightly less it doesn't actually seem to be the case it is still allocating more or less exactly the same amount of memory maybe a hundred megabytes less there's definitely not much in it but what will happen with the games you're going to find out ow and i'm going to hit the wall games like watch dogs legion do actually recommend 16 gigabytes of ram if you do want to play at the highest settings so i'm expecting to see a fair bit of difference really between 8 and 16. our first result ladies and gentlemen and we have an average of 59 fps at 1080p which is way lower than we saw at 32 and 16. that is a massive difference from something that is actually a pretty well not only a very cheap upgrade but very simple to do will the result be better or worse at 4k well we went from 45 frames a second at 32 to 45 frames a second at 16 and we've dropped ever so slightly to 43 at eight but fundamentally the gpu load is still at one hundred percent so i wouldn't really say that this is outside the margin of error so clearly here it's not been a huge factor but it's definitely a little bit too close for comfort moving on to some cyberpunk it's not like there's any sudden stutter or anything that i can really feel when i'm walking about the street so at first glance it doesn't seem like there's anything to complain about at 4k 88 frames a second at 1080p so that's another game where we're actually losing around about 10 to 15 percent of the performance just by not having enough ram however at 4k we did actually see very similar results to watch dogs legion where there wasn't really anything in it we lost one fps versus 16 and then 3 versus 32 so all within that margin of error but don't go thinking that you need less ram as you go up in resolution it's just that your system resources are being used to push all of those extra pixels and you're being limited by your gpu or your cpu rather than being ram limited like we were at 1080p game number three fortnite and i've got a drop in exactly the same place every time i can tell you that at 4k it's pretty much exactly the same story more or less exactly the same fps but at 1080p we did actually have 304 with 16 gigabytes of ram whereas we're now getting 274 frames a second that's still a huge amount of fps but it is a noticeable drop for eight gigabytes clearly it's just not enough anymore which leads us on to our final game then call of duty warzone 4k dlss i'm actually expecting to see a difference despite the fact that it is 4k but we shall find out not after a short word from this video sponsor because there isn't one because i was off rather than actually trying to make some money i was actually spending it all down the garden center all of that youtube money has gone on a new cherry tree it's gone on some bedding plants that the dog has already ruined some grass seed and some compost i'm an exciting chap here we go then the final result we went from 129 fps to 133 so no real change will we get something similar the answer is no 120 frames a second and this is substantial because this is actually running at that 4k dlss resolution so if you're going to be running at 1440p or 1080p then clearly this is going to be more pronounced so what have we learned here today well to be honest pretty much everything i've been telling you guys really for the last year or so on the old pc centric builds that 16 gigabytes of ram is not necessarily just the sweet spot but it's what you should be going for if you're looking at getting a gaming pc because if you get eight gigabytes then it's not going to be enough you're going to run into certain limitations but then if you go for 32 gigabytes of ram then this is going to cost you an extra what 100 potentially 125 pounds and that is money that normally you'd be able to pump into the graphics card or the processor and that would then yield even higher frames a second but do you agree with this do you think that you would go for 32 for the extra longevity or have you still got a and to be honest for what you've got it's working fine i would love to hear from you so do let me know down in the comment section below if you want to upgrade your ram i'll leave some links with my amazon affiliate links listed down below so you can check out the best prices i guess and some of my favorite kits but thank you so much for watching smash that like button if you've enjoyed it get subscribed more just like this and if you have any ideas for future videos that you want to see let me know down in that comment section below thanks for watching i'll catch you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: PC Centric

Views: 410,295

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Id: GVz7_v-pw3E

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021