- Since our last video on this topic, a lot has changed. AMD took the CPU core
wars to the next level. NVIDIA turned RTX on and Apple dropped the new Mac Pro. But has RAM usage changed? Do you, Wanda, really need
1 1/2 terabytes of RAM or will just a dab do yah? To find out, we tested
a variety of workloads. Everything from opening
browser RAMs in Chrome, (chuckles) excuse me, browser tabs, to high resolution gaming, to 4K video editing, to complex Flow Simulation on a single four-gig stick of RAM, the smallest available for DDR4, all the way up to a monstrous 256 gig kit and everything in between. And how much do you need? Well, as always the answer is, it depends. And as always, here's
a segue to our sponsor. XSplit, XSplit makes
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change or blur your background without a green screen. We're gonna have that linked below. (bright music) Just like last time, we're gonna track page file usage with performance monitor and open up tasks until we notice activity in the page file. That threshold where the system starts to swap data out of RAM and onto the boot drive is important. Not because you would
instantly see your system slow down to a crawl, but because that's where
you could see a dip in system responsiveness
when switching between apps or even an increase in load times for programs that have been paged to your SSD or hard drive. Before we begin though, I wanna talk through one of
the most important choices for a video like this. For our CPU, we went with the
24-core AMD Threadripper 3960X because it allowed us to test every one of our RAM configurations on the same ASUS Zenith
II Extreme motherboard, eliminating that as a variable. We also went with that
because we wanted a system that was reasonably representative of what will become available
to general consumers over the next few years. We could have plunked a 64-core processor onto that same motherboard, but that ain't going mainstream. While the way things are going, 24-core actually might, thanks AMD. We went with an RTX 2080
SUPER graphics card, a Corsair MP600 1 terabyte boot drive and a variety of Corsair
Vengeance Memory that was chosen simply because Corsair has an
incredibly broad memory lineup that covers any config we could want and they sent it over to us. At four gigabytes, everything
is about as you would expect. We're sitting at around 50% usage after logging into Windows
before we've even done anything. Simply opening Chrome and
watching a 4k YouTube video immediately pings the page
file crossing our threshold. If you avoid video, the good news is that you
can open six to seven tabs of various text and image-based sites before you see page file use and we got to about 125 tabs before Chrome decided it had had enough and completely pooped itself. Eight gigs was much better. We comfortably handled
three 4K videos from YouTube and 27 tabs at the same time before we saw any page file usage. 630 tabs later, we saw the
system become unresponsive and laggy anytime we tried
to load or reload a page. Maybe on Linux, four gigs would be okay, but eight gigs looks like
the lowest we'd recommend for a good Windows 10 experience. With 16 and 32 gigs, we stuck with the three 4K YouTube videos, you can only watch so many
videos at the same time, and made it to 430 and 730
other tabs respectively before tapping that page file. Now Chrome wasn't very happy when we hit our max tabs in either case, but as long as we didn't
touch anything else, the computer was actually still usable. It's safe to say that anything beyond this is pretty much colossal overkill. Onto the games. Shadow of the Tomb Raider
calls for eight gigs of RAM for its minimum spec and 16
for its recommended spec. Rainbow Six Siege wants
six gigs of RAM minimum and only eight gigs recommended. And finally, we've got CS:GO that needs just two gigs of RAM, just two. You can basically run on
overclocked potato at this point. All of our games were ran at
1440p in the highest settings with no motion blur, obviously. Starting at four gigs of RAM, CS:GO (chuckles) as advertised ran just fine at 278 frames per second with no noticeable issues. But while both Tomb Raider
and Siege seemed to run well at 90 and 154 FPS respectively, what's interesting here is that
these great looking numbers did not translate to a
great gameplay experience due to occasional frame rate dips. Both games reached about
60% page file usage, so I think we know what to blame. Tomb Raider jumped to 103 FPS when we switched to eight gigs of RAM and smoothed out considerably with almost no stutters
or hitching to be seen. And Rainbow Six also improved to 155 FPS, so okay, not really. But just like Tomb Raider, all the stuttering was gone. CS:GO added a whopping six frames. But sarcasm aside, it
was a solid experience with no issues as we'd expect. So eight gigs then is
still plenty for gaming? Well, here's the thing. On a sanitized benchmarking
Windows install, nothing else is gonna be
running in the background. That's not representative
of the real world. And when Tomb Raider
and Siege were running, they were using seven to 7 1/2 gigs of RAM and the page file hit
20% usage on occasion. So having Chrome, Discord, and or a music app open in the background would likely affect
performance to some degree. Fortunately, moving up to 16 gigs gives us plenty of room to work with. Just like there's plenty
of room in your closet for our merch, lttstore.com. Average frame rates either
stayed steady or improved and we had plenty of headroom
to record our gameplay or stream in the background. Past this point though, there was no real
performance gain or loss. Adobe Premiere cut four and
eight gigs down pretty quick with the four-gig setup
crashing on a regular basis anytime we tried to render
just a one-minute test clip. And as for our eight-gig config, it did manage to render the clip but it took a hot minute, as the kids say. The video that we're using
is a mix of edited 4K and 8K footage from
one of our past videos. At 16 gigs, Premiere was usable with our render taking just
three minutes and 23 seconds but scrubbing and playback was like watching an
old movie picture real. Remember guys, this is on a Threadripper and at both 1/4 and 1/8 scale. So we'd say this is okay as long as you're willing to wait around to create proxies before you edit. So those are lower resolution
versions of your clips or if you stick with 1080p. 32 gig and beyond is gonna help bring your
render times even lower and work with much larger and more complicated project files. A lot of the usage here
though is gonna come down to your individual workflow needs. Our editors, Mark and A.Prime have slightly different machines. With Mark's having 64 gigs of
RAM and Prime's having 128. Both of them have Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, Chrome, Word and Excel open while editing a video and depending on the video, Mark will see 85 to 95%
usage while he edits and A.Prime will see 60 to 70% sometimes spiking to 90%
utilization or 115 gigs. Now up until this point in the video, I would forgive you for
thinking that 256 gigs is overkill for anything. But while nothing that
average folks are likely to do will ever touch it, engineers and scientists will often have huge
amounts of data to deal with to the point where such a system load-out might not even be a luxury,
but rather a necessity. Check out our RAM Punisher
Flow Simulation benchmark. The more memory you have, the more variables you can account for, improving the airflow calculations around this Cybertruck model. This thing can easily
suck up 256 gigs of RAM and actually prefers to have more. Shout out to Flow Joe, by
the way, for this benchmark. Another example is a
professional composer and mixer like Neil Parfitt, who regularly has projects
reach upwards of 215 gigs thanks to all of the tracks and instrument sets that he needs loaded. Having them in memory
means instant access. Now one thing our test was
not able to account for today was the increase in memory bandwidth as we scaled from single channel to dual and quad channel configurations. That's why we focused page
file usage as our threshold rather than on the
performance differences. But stay subscribed
because that is something that we would like to
explore going forward. So then in the end, conclusion. You're probably fine with just a solid eight to 16 gigs of RAM for your everyday use and gaming. If you do photo and video editing, bump that up to 32 or 64 or 128 if you do it professionally. And beyond that, well, it's
probably just bragging rights unless you know for a fact that you're doing something
that benefits from it. Which we're not judging. Bragging rights is okay too. Just like you'll have bragging rights by switching to our sponsor, XSplit. XSplit VCam allows you to remove, replace, and blur your background
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down below to get 10% off. All right, if you guys
like crazy RAM videos, maybe check out our recent one, opening up Chrome tabs on a system with two terabytes of ride. It's a wild and sometimes
very tedious ride. But don't worry, we cut out the tedium. It's just, it's a fun video. Stop, what do you people want? Everybody's messaging me.
I mean 8 gb is definitely enough right now for most people but so many of these laptops are un-upgradable so you're stuck with it if there's some RAM intensive game or application that pops up in the future.
The big thing to remember here is that in the video they were using a dGPU with 8GB of VRAM. On 4500/4700U ultra portables, you are likely relying on the iGPU which will 'steal' a good chunk of your system RAM. While 8GB might seem like enough based on the video, take 2GB away and suddenly you are much closer the performance of 4GB that was pretty unacceptable.
I'd love to see a similar benchmark done with a higher end Ryzen APU and see if the 8GB still being enough held true.
How many containers can I run?
I don't know the specifics of their benchmarks, but I'm able to easily use all of my current 16GiB (13.6GiB of system memory since the rest is used as VRAM by my APU) of RAM in Firefox or Chrome with only 200-300 tabs or so (which I have open regularly - atm I have 215 open tabs in 16 windows and am using 10.5GiB of RAM).
smemshows firefox is only using about 9GB atm, but I have a couple electron apps (200MiB+ each), Slack (400MiB), Dropbox (250MiB) running, as well as the base system which is 200-500MiB. This is without running any dev (emulators, containers, db/app daemons), or any photo, video editing, or other content creation apps.RAM usage is only going to go up so if you're going to have a non-upgradeable/soldered maximum amount of RAM and plan to use your machine as a daily driver for any extended period of time, I think it'd be silly to get 8GB of RAM (effectively much less if you're using an APU), especially considering how cheap memory is these days (8GB SODIMMs are $30 retail). Laptop manufacturers only get away with totally cheaping out on RAM because consumers let them.
8GB is fine now. But everytime you purchase a laptop or any system, you buy it so it's future proof for atleast the coming 4-5 years. In that case, I'd take the 16GB for sure.
Windows - 2-3gb, wsl 2 + docker: 2-2.5, chrome: inf, idea: 1.5.... Not enough!
Would I love 16GB, or at least the option? Yes. Will I deal with 8GB in the ultrathin and light Acer Swift 3 with a great cpu and vega graphics? Yes. I really don't need 16GB, as much as it would help.
8gb is fine, the issue is that 8gb will generally be
dualsingle channel (as far as I'm aware)Just went from a laptop with 16GB to another with 8GB. It is really not enough for Chrome. It hangs up with even 10 heavy tabs while SSD is busy writing to a page file... It's much better with Opera though.